Today I had a nice long phone chat with one of my best friends. She isn’t much into computers or internet. When I told her that I’ll have a guest for painting soon and that we have planned to blog daily about our activities on my art blog, my friend said: Oh, then I’ll have to go to that blog every day! - No, you have not to!
Of course you can bookmark a blog’s web address (URL) and then click there every day. But the good thing about blogs is: you don’t need to go there to get the information! You can subscribe to the RSS feed!
(No worries, I won’t bother you with technical terms here. If you want to read more check the wikipedia article about that.)
What is an RSS feed?
An RSS feed is nothing but a list of the articles that have been published on a blog. In all of my blogs you have the possibility to
- subscribe in a feed reader
- subscribe to get feed by eMail
Subscribing means: you get the articles delivered to a place and in a way YOU define. Everytime a new article is published you get a notification (in your feed reader or by eMail).
You recognize the link to subscribe to RSS feeds on this sign:
Btw. not only blogs but also some websites also have RSS feeds! So look for this sign or the word “RSS” there!
1. Subscribe in a feed reader
A feed reader is a program that allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and to manage them. Google reader is one of them but there are a lot more feedreader services that don’t even have to be web-based like the Google reader.
If you click on my RSS link on top right in the sidebar here, you’ll get to a page that contains the following box:
Subscribing with a feedreader
There you can chose the reader you want to use. This option of chosing a reader isn’t common on every blog but due to the fact that I use the service of Feedburner which makes it easier to manage feeds (and has recently been acquired by Google).
2. Subscribe to get feed by eMail
If you don’t use a feedreader yet, you can subscribe to my blogs by eMail too. If you click the resp. link in my sidebar here you get to a page that looks like this:
Subscribing by eMail
The rest is explained there. 
Once you have subscribed by eMail, you get a new mail everytime I post a new article on the blog you have subscribed to. The article will be displayed in that mail so you don’t have to go to the blog to read it.
But the headline of the article will be a link to the orignal blogpost so you can go there directly from your mail and comment or read other people’s comments on the article.
You usually don’t respond to blogposts by eMail (unless you don’t want it to be public) but post a comment under the article.
So if you want to be updated about articles on this blog or on any of my other blogs, just chose the way you want to subscribe to the resp. feed and there you go! 
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Or do you still have questions?
Then please leave me a comment down here.
[...] more information please read the blogpost about this subject on my agency [...]
Another question for you. I would love to offer the exact same email subscribe widget that you are using as my of my clients do not use RSS. Do you have to pay for that service for Feedburner?
Again, if you wouldn’t mind providing the html for the widget that you are using and telling me where to place it, I would greatly appreciate it. You are doing GREAT work!
An email reply would be ideal (and feel free to copy here if you’d like) so that I can file it.
Thanks,
Linsey
Feedburner is for free, you don’t have to pay for it. And you cannot copy someone else’s code because it always refers to a concrete feed you have set up in feedburner.