RSS Feed IconYou see that icon on the left? Well, of course you do - stupid question - it’s bright orange and I magnified it! This little icon was introduced to the world by the fine folks at Mozilla and it lets everyone know that an RSS feed is available. As a matter of fact, if you look at the top of our column to the right, you’ll see that we’ve got one too. That’s because we want you to subscribe to our feed. We want you to subscribe so badly that we even offer lots of different ways to do so.

Right about now I’m pretty sure that some of you are saying, “What the heck is an RSS feed and why in the world would I want to subscribe to one?” But, even if you’re not, here’s the lowdown: First, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and, second, the best reason to subscribe to our feed, or any RSS feed, is so that you can stay up-to-date without needing to visit Life on the Road each and every day.

Here’s How It Works
RSS, very basically, creates a computer-readable summary of blog, web or news site content. The summary might be just the headlines, the headlines plus a post excerpt, or even the headlines plus the entire post. These summaries can then be read by an RSS Reader or RSS Aggregator.

Here’s What You Need
If you’ve got a “MY Yahoo!“, “My AOL” or “MY MSN” page then you’re all set. All you’ve got to do is click the corresponding button near the top of the right column and follow a few instructions. Same thing for Google and Bloglines. If you’re not already set up with one of them, however, I have a suggestion you might want to look into. I used to use MY Yahoo! as my homepage and I was pretty satisfied with the it. Not too long ago, though, at the suggestion of a good friend, I set myself up with Pageflakes. It does everything that the others do but I like the format a whole lot better; and I can customize the display properties for each flake. Check it out for yourself. It’s easy to set up and if you do a little experimentation you can end up with a really great and really useful homepage.

By the way, if you set yourself up with Pageflakes then all you’ve got to do is click the “Add Feed” button, enter our feed URL - http://lifeontheroad.com/feed - in the text entry field, and click the “Get Feed” button. That’s all there is to it!

Here’s Why You Really Want To Do This
Once you’re all set up with an RSS reader like Bloglines, MY Yahoo!, or Pageflakes you’ll be able to view news headlines, weather forecasts, the content of all your favorite blogs (like Life on the Road!), and a whole lot more, from your personalized home page. Instead of traipsing all over the web you can use one application to bring the web to you. Cool, eh? If you’ve got any questions or comments let me hear ‘em!