In the upper Left, under the title and beautiful green grass you'll see the RSS icon (the little orange speaker thingy). Click on it to add it to your feed reader. Or simply add this address:
http://dalen.wordpress.com/feed/
*Note: If you have Yahoo! Mail, they have a new beta version out that has an RSS feedreader built in. GMail will be adding it soon as well.
RSS information:
5. How do I read a feed?
You need a feedreader, also called an aggregator. More details below.
6. Why are feeds good?
There are a number of reasons. Here are a few:
* If you have 10 friends who have blogs, then to see if they have blogged anything you need to visit their sites to see that. 10 visits you will need to make and that's 10 page loads. If you had a feedreader, it can check those 10 blogs every hour and let you know when one had been updated. That saves you time.
* If you are on dial-up, you don't have to visit 10 blogs and load all that information. Your reader will get just the latest posts. That saves you time.
* If you have a lot of readers, each page hit costs you bandwidth as visitors need to download the whole page to read what you have written. Giving a feed means people will use that and you save bandwidth. (Not applicable to wordpress.com but it's still a reason)
* You can have constant searches. If you go to the web-based blog aggregators you can search inside their feeds. Let's say you have an interest in 'Dr Pepper'. You could search for that - and the results page will have a feed. If you load that feed into your reader then you will have a constant search for 'Dr Pepper' at that site. Additionally you can usually set up a reader to watch for words in all the feeds it gets too.
* If your feedreader archives, then you can keep lots of information in that as a reference. For example, if you read something in a feed and then a few days later you need that article again, your feedreader should be able to search and find what you need.
7. Where can I find a feedreader?
There are many programs. They fall into two categories: Web-based, Desktop-based.
* Web-based - Bloglines is one example. They are services you subscribe to. They offer hundreds of feeds, you can see what other people are reading, see the popular feeds and they take care of the grabbing of the feeds.
* Desktop programs run on your machine and you can still browse other feed sites.
Try both - unless you use more than one computer or you are going away and want to keep up to date. In those cases a web-based service could be better. Whatever you choose though, do look for the free stuff - there are some really good free readers out there.
You can find lists here:
http://www.literature.at/elib/www/wiki/index.php
http://www.newsonfeeds.com/faq/aggregators
Nearly all of them will come pre-loaded with some feeds.
Adding your feeds will be as easy as either adding a URL or dragging an icon.[/url]
