SpringWidgets allows you to display other sites feed contents on your website’s sidebar. Below is an example:

With the SpringWidget, your visitors would just need to click the feed items to be taken to the feed owner’s website to view the feed contents. The SpringWidget also has other useful features:

1. The Menu allows your visitors to click and view the other websites feeds that you have embedded into your SpringWidget.

2. The Options button allows your visitors to copy and embed exactly the displayed feed listing + the SpringWidget into their own website or blog.

Below are the steps involved to embed this site’s feed into your website:

Step 1: Locate and click the RSS icon as shown below.

Step 2: Click “Embed with: SpringWidgets”

Step 3:

To set the width and height of the widget to be displayed on your website’s sidebar, change the “set widget embed size” box settings. Once this is done, click anywhere on the screen and your sample widget (on your right side of the screen ) will display the new width and height settings.

Besides embedding this site’s feeds (Feed’s URLs automatically displayed for you) , you can also type in other website’s feed URLs (if you wish your SpringWidget to display their feeds as well) and clicking the “+” sign.

Tick “Show Title Only” box if you only want to display the feed titles on your SpringWidget without displaying any of the feed’s contents.

If you want to display part of the feed’s contents on your SpringWidget, indicate the length in the box provided.

Click the “Border Color” box to select the color of your SpringWidget border.

Note: To see the result (with regard to the SpringWidget as displayed on your right) of the above settings, just click any part of the screen.

Step 4: At the bottom left of the SpringWidget, click the Options button and the select the displayed options of your choice (to enable your Springwidget’s width & height to match the default size of the options selected). Selecting any of the option box will generate and display the appropriate HTML codes. Click the “Copy Code” button to copy the generated codes. Paste the HTML codes into your site’s sidebar or blog’s sidebar text widget.

Once this is done, your website’s sidebar should display this site’s feed on your new SpringWidget.

If you like this post, please consider subscribing to this site’s RSS feed. You can also subscribe by email and any new posts will be sent directly to your inbox.

Feeds are known as RSS which stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’.

When you subscribe for RSS feeds belonging to different websites, you will automatically get the new contents or post as soon as they are published either through email or through your feed reader, without having to visit the individual websites you have subscribed the feeds from.

How you will receive the feeds will depend on whether you have signed up for the feeds via email or in a reader format.

If you sign up for a RSS feed in a reader format, you would need a feed reader to view your feeds. A feed reader will automatically check whether any new feed is added by the website owner(s) and lets you read any new contents that have been added. Below are some of the common feed readers which you can sign up for an account:
1. My Yahoo!
2. Google Reader
3. Bloglines
4. Newsgator
5. Pageflakes
6. My AOL

Note: If you are using Mozilla Firefox browser (a feed reader), you can read your feeds that are stored in your Live Bookmarks or you can click the RSS icon on the right side of the URL address box. This is provided that you have subscribed to feeds that you intend to read in this manner. See explanation below.

How to subscribe to my feeds?
The feeds in my website is powered by FeedBurner. If you are interested to subscribe to my feeds, all you have to do is to decide on how you want to read the feeds. If you want to read the feeds through a feed reader, you have to click the orange RSS icon or text link as shown below:

Once this is done, you will then be taken to a page where you have the option to choose either:

1. the feed reader (you must have an account with them) that you want to use.

2. to view the feeds via a browser (Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Safari) by clicking the “View Feed XML” link.

Finally, if you wish to receive the feeds through email, you should click the link as shown below:

Once this is done, you will then be taken to a page where you are required to provide your email address to subscribe to the feeds:

Note: Some websites will provide a signup form for you to subscribe to their feeds instead of the above text link. See example below:

I hope this post on RSS and how to sign up and use the RSS feeds is useful.

For those of you who are new to RSS feeds, you may wish to try it out and subscribe to my feeds.

If you like this post, please consider subscribing to this site’s RSS feed. You can also subscribe by email and any new posts will be sent directly to your inbox.

Below are the steps to set up your RSS feed subscription on your site:

Step 1: Go to feedburner.com. Enter your blog’s url (e.g. xwordpress.com) in the box below and click the “Next” button

Step 2: FeedBurner will display your Feed Address where your feed will be located. If you do not have a FeedBurner account, you will be asked to create one with them. Click “Activate Feed” button

Step 3: The screen will display the following confirmation. Click the “Next” button.

Step 4: Click the boxes as per your prefere3nce. Click the “Next” button.

Step 5: The screen will display the following: “You have successfully update the feed “……………com”. Click the “publicize” tab.

Step 6: There are two options to enable your visitors to subscribe to your feed.

Option 1: This is to generate (publish a chicklet via FeedBurner) and put a RSS button (as show below) on your blog to enable your visitors to click on the logo button to subscribe to your feed.

In the FeedBurner screen as shown above, click “Chicklet Chooser” The following screen will be displayed:

I suggest you select “Subscribe in a reader” as this is a standard feed icon. Scroll down to locate the HTML codes (depending on your selection) generated by FeedBurner. Copy the HTML codes and place them in your blog (see step 8 below)

Based on the above HTML codes, you blog should display the following:

Option 2: This will generate a set of HTML codes via Feedburner that will enable your visitors to subscribe to your feed by email where they will automatically receive any new posts via email. In the FeedBurner link below, click “Email Subscriptions”.

In the email subscription screen, select your email service provider to deliver your feeds. Select FeedBurner and click the “Activate” button.

Once you have activated their service, FeedBurner will display a Subscription Management screen that will allow you to choose two ways for your visitors to subscribe to your post by email:

a. Subscription form – a set of codes will be displayed. Copy the codes and placed them in your blog (see step 8 below). Your blog should display the following subscription form:

b. Subscription text link - a set of codes will be displayed. Copy the codes and placed them in your blog (see step 8 below). Your blog should display the following subscription link:

If you wish, you may change the link text and add an email icon before the same as show below:

Please click on this link to see how it is done.

Note: Before you leave the email subscription screen, remember to click the “Save” button.

Step 8: Create a “text” widget on your sidebar. Copy the codes generated in step 7 above and paste the same into the “text” widget. Save and click refresh – the screen should display the subscription format which will enable your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feeds.

If you like this post, please consider subscribing to this site’s RSS feed. You can also subscribe by email and any new posts will be sent directly to your inbox.

With advent of social bookmarking sites, these sites will allow you to store, tag and share bookmarking links with other people with similar interest, where you can access your bookmarked links from any computer by logging on to your bookmarking site.

Bookmarking sites are free to use. To access these sites, you must sign up for an account with them first before you can start to bookmark your favorite web page(s). To sign up or to start your bookmarking of your favorite web page on a particular web site, you just need to click the social bookmarking icon links that are normally found at the bottom of each web page. Below is an example of the icon links that you would normally see on some web pages:

Putting these bookmark icon links on your site would greatly increase traffic to your site. Imagine your visitors bookmarking your web page and the same appears on the front page of the bookmarking sites where users of these bookmarking sites can get to see and may click on the links to your site! Secondly your visitors may bookmark your web page and share the links with their friends using the same bookmarking site. They in turn may share the same links with their other friends. These is how powerful social bookmarking links can be, when used on your site to generate substantial traffic to your site provided you have good articles on your site.

The best and easiest way to put links to the various bookmarking sites is to use a plugin. The plugin I am using is the “I Love Social Bookmarking” plugin by Aaron Russell. If you want more options, here is a list of bookmarking plugins that are listed on Wordpress.org site that you may consider using.

If you like this post, please consider subscribing to this site’s RSS feed. You can also subscribe by email and any new posts will be sent directly to your inbox.