A K9JY.com subscription offers you the ability to receive the full content from the blog as it is published on the site — without coming to the site to read it.
There are two ways to receive the content: via e-mail or via a “Really Simple Syndication (RSS)” reader.
A good percentage of my subscribers receive posts via e-mail. Since I rarely do more than two posts a day, you will receive one or two e-mails each business day using this method.
If you process most of your work via e-mail or have few subscriptions, this is a good method to receive the articles.
You should note that I do nothing with your e-mail address except fully respect the privacy of it.
To subscribe via e-mail, enter your e-mail address in the subscription box on the upper right section of the blog and click on the “subscribe” button beneath it.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
Most of my subscribers receive articles using this method. RSS utilizes a “news reader” program on the web or your computer that goes out and looks for updated content you have subscribed to (for example, once per hour) and provides the article to you.
The method of subscribing is to click on this symbol when you find it on the blog:
To use Really Simple Syndication, you will need a “news reader.” There are many readers out there and selecting one is fairly easy to do. If you want to read your subscriptions only on the web, for example, you can utilize My Yahoo, Bloglines, or Google Reader.
If you’d like web-based reading as well as reading via a client on your PC, NewsGator offers a good suite of free products, including an interface from NewsGator to your Outlook Inbox. You can even get news on your mobile phone…
I personally use FeedDemon as a client that also synchronizes with NewsGator so I can read either on my laptop or from any computer hooked to the Internet.
All readers will work with virtually all sites, so select a reader you are comfortable with and use that for your subscriptions.
Advantages of Really Simple Syndication
There are some very good reasons to go the RSS route instead of e-mail for your subscriptions:
- Your subscription comes to a reader, not your e-mail box. If you get lots of e-mails, this adds more volume. Also, if you change your e-mail address, you’ll need to change all of your subscriptions. With RSS, where you read stays the same.
- You can organize your subscriptions into folders. For example, I have folders for career management, ham radio, and news. This enables you to read all the subscriptions by topic rather than via a linear e-mail subscription.
- You provide no personal information to your subscription and the provider (me, in this case) has no personal information about you that would need protecting.
- You can click and subscribe and click to unsubscribe. It’s that easy compared to opting out via e-mail.
- Easy to change reading programs. You can import and export your subscriptions from one reader to another using an OPML file (you’ll see the import/export option on the reader program. I’ve used about five different readers, both client and web based, and easily move 150 subscriptions from one to the other. If you use e-mail and want to move to an RSS reader, you’ll have to build it from scratch in the reader and opt out in each e-mail — a lot more work.
RSS isn’t just for subscribing to blogs — you can get your news, sports and entertainment information through your subscriptions as well. For example, the feeds available on MSNBC is an entire page of options, allowing you to really focus on the news you want, delivered right to your news reader.
Or, you can subscribe to the news feed on the ARRL site and have the new ones brought to your reader rather than you clicking to the site.
Once you’ve tried a news reader for your subscriptions, you won’t go back. They save time, help keep your information organized, and effortlessly provide the information you want to read to you.
Scot, K9JY
