10. Add some subscriptions

Now that you have a feed reader set up, it's time to add some subscriptions. This task will guide you through the process of adding a subscription to digg, a technology news site whose content is contributed by users and decided by vote.

Digg

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the most popular news as voted on by its users. You won't find editors at Digg - Digg provides a place where people can collectively determine the value of content.

Digg is geek and American centric. However, over the past few weeks some Australian stories have made the front page of digg, including the Chaser antics and the OPEC forum.

Your tasks

1. Subscribe to digg.com through your feed reader.
2. Create a post in your blog telling the world about digg.com. Do you think this would be a good way to read the news in the future?

How to add a subscription in your feed reader

Go to the site you wish to subscribe to and look for the feed link somewhere on the site. It is usually a button looking somewhat like this:



Sometimes, however, it is called an "RSS feed" or "XML feed". More information is available at Google Reader's site.

Click on the feed button or link.

The following steps assume you are using Google Reader. If you are using another feed reader, such as Bloglines, you should find out how to subscribe to feeds at their respective website.

If you're using Mozilla Firefox, you should now see a preview of the feed. Subscribing is as easy as selecting Google from the drop-down box and selecting "Add to Google Reader".

If you're using Internet Explorer 6, you may just see some code. You will need to copy the address from the location bar in your browser (it starts with "http:") and go to Google Reader. Once in Google Reader, click the "Add subscription" button on the left hand side and paste the address you copied previously.

What's next?

Now, you might want to go and subscribe to some of your friends' blogs. Some blogs won't have a visible link to their feed, but they can still be subscribed to in most feed readers just by copying the address of the site when you add a subscription to your feed reader.

Resources

• Digg goes deeper with social networking
• How Digg works
• Beginner's guide to Digg
• The day Digg users revolted
• How do I find a site's feed?

The section on Digg was originally written by Kat Clancy of Deakin University.