Although we have many people subscribing to the AgWired rss feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Agwired) what happens if you don’t want all our news? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just subscribe to the content you’re most interested in?

Well you can. Here’s how:

Let’s say you work for an advertising agency and would just like to subscribe to news we give the Agency category to. That’s easy to find using our drop down menu of Categories which you’ll find in the left sidebar. The Agency category is this: http://agwired.com/category/agency/.

So to make that into a news feed (rss) that your news reader of choice will recognize, just add the word feed to the end of the url. There you go. A custom rss feed of all our agency categorized news. The url now looks like this: http://agwired.com/category/agency/feed.

This works for any of our categories and we’ve got 177 to choose from! So perhaps you’d like to just subscribe to news posts for John Deere, just add the word “feed” to that category url and here’s the url you use to subscribe with: http://agwired.com/category/john-deere/feed

Make sense? Easy isn’t it?

Let me add one more little item of trickery for you. Since you know we post so much audio and you may or may not want to listen to it on your computer how about if you create a podcast of our audio. Yes, you heard me right. Do the same thing I described above but use iTunes or some other podcatching software to subscribe. It will only search and pull from posts that have audio posted in them and by category or from our main rss feed, your choice. Try it. Then your iTunes will pull the audio into your computer and you can sync it to your iPod to listen to when and where you want.

Let me know if you have any problems. So for those of you who still aren’t using a news reader or subscribing to and listening to podcasts, here’s a few suggested links for you:

News Reader Software:

NewsGator – Has a web, PC, Mac and iPhone version and they all sync with each other. My favorite.
Internet Explorer – Yes your browser will do this for you. Here’s a How-To.
Firefox – Same goes for this browser.
Google Reader
Most email programs do this now to.

Podcast software:

iTunes – The best in my opinion and for either Mac or PC. Here’s a How-To.

Are you still one of those people who don’t understand what RSS is? Wonder no more. The people at Commoncraft have made understanding very easy (I think).

Click To Play

I have tried my best to describe this to many people and I find that it works best to show it in action, which I do in many of my workshops and presentations. These guys have put together a great video though and it’s worth watching even if you are a pro since you may find it helpful in trying to describe RSS to the un-enlightened.

I actively promote NewsGator as “the” news aggregator program you should use. For one thing it integrates right into Outlook and although the RSS feeds you subscribe to aren’t email, it allows you to view and handle them like email, including being able to forward a feed to someone as an email!

The online version of NewsGator is free. You create an account, subscribe to the feeds you want and then let NewsGator go retrieve them. With this version you have to visit the NewsGator website and log in to view and edit your feeds. This is why I like the (very low cost) Outlook version. I don’t have to go anywhere except my Outlook folder to see my feeds. The new version is NewsGator Outlook 2.5.

Plus I don’t have to cut and past the news feed url into the online edition, although it’s really not difficult. Here’s how you do it with the Outlook version. When you see the feed you want, you just right click and one of your choices is “Subscribe in NewsGator.” You click on it and you’re done. The feed is added and it checks for updates immediately.

Well now that you know my personal favorite, what’s yours and why? Feel free to post a comment on this or email me. Do you subscribe to RSS feeds? Are you using RSS?