Subscriptions are free, and very useful. They let you know when new things are added to your favorite sites. If there are pages that you like to check up on, you can save a lot of time by signing up for their feed. No more wasted time, from visiting sites that haven't been updated.
Usually the subscription link will be accompanied by a small orange icon. If you like what you've read, you can sign up for the subscription or "feed" in a couple different ways. You can have the new articles added to a news reader or aggregator, or by email. You can tell a site has a feed available usually by seeing the orange icon to the right of their web page address in the address bar. That little icon is clickable, and you can make sure not to miss another minute.
I use iGoogle and I add all the feeds to my favorite blogs and other important places directly to my homepage. There are also similar services from the other major sites. When there is a new article posted, I know right away. And you can cancel your subscription whenever you want, and sign up again later if things get interesting.
In the FireFox browser you can save a feed as a "live bookmark" so as the posts get added to the site the bookmark turns into a drop down menu of headlines. This is great for reading newspaper feeds, as they cover a wide range of topics . You can skip past the links in the bookmark that don't appeal to you, and go straight for the headlines that catch your eye.
You don't have to check everyday to see if there is new content, the feed automatically updates when the author publishes new posts.
A news reader can be a program that is very similar to an email client. You just add the subscription links from your favorite feeds and the aggregator is very much like a up-to-the-minute magazine that is especially personalized to you.
Some of the most popular online feed readers
Subscription by email is a nice alternative if you don't get many feeds and want to stay current. Just as with the others, you are notified but this time with an email, as soon as there is new content. If you get more than a few feeds, this can really load your inbox. Feeds can become quite addictive, because of all the time savings; but you may lose some time deleting all those extra emails. Now that there are so many newsreaders integrated into the major search engine home pages, you might want to see how to add a newsreader module to that instead.
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