RSS for Newbies
If you're new here, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed. Thanks very much for visiting!
Suscribe to the posts only feed or the comments only feed now!
I’ve been interested in RSS for a long time. In fact, I wrote a paper on it once upon a time. I recommend that you check Feedburner’s “Feed 101″ page, or for those who need it, the humorous page “How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way” (found that via the link on the Feed 101 page, btw).
My personal choice for RSS stuff is not an online service, but a program for use on my home computer. I like Mozilla Thunderbird a lot. When I jumped to Firefox from Internet Explorer ages ago, I thought I’d like to try Thunderbird, which is an email client, due precisely to the fact that I had to juggle multiple email accounts. (College address, as well as addresses I was transitioning into and away from.) It allows you to set up an “RSS Account” which is really just a place to collect and manage a bunch of RSS subscriptions. It shows up like any other email account, with a bunch of folders that represent “inboxes.” When a site updates, it “sends” a message to my “inbox” and I read it as though it’s an email. What’s actually happening is that the client is checking the RSS feed, downloading and displaying updated content. It’s pretty freaking cool. As I’ve said before, it means I don’t go to my news anymore. It means my news comes to me.
For this site, only the entries are available as an RSS feed. (Comments are not yet available in a feed.) You can find a link to my feed at the bottom of the right hand side of my site. You can use the RSS logo link, or the Feedburner link. My RSS feed runs through a popular 3rd party service called Feedburner, but the origin is this site. Feedburner just keeps track of statistical data for me. When you get the Feedburner page for my site, you can choose to use an online subscription service of your choice (a few of which are available as buttons on my website, too). If you want to subscribe via a standalone program, then just insert the address http://www.rockinginhakata.com/feed/ and you’ll be all set. Hope that helps, guys.
Update: Oh yeah, and if you’re lazy, I’ve duplicated the feed and integrated it with my Facebook profile. You can subscribe using Facebook, as well. (But you’ll have to come back here for the videos and whatnot. Same for RSS feeds. They’re usually all text, to keep them small.) Visiting the site via a link in the feed is easy, though. So don’t sweat it. 
That should cover it. Questions are welcome.
Update #2: I have now set up a feedburned RSS feed for the comments to this website. Subscribe now! It’s like crack. You can’t stop. Ever. Or else.