Subscribe to the Guardian via its RSS feed” gives an overview of subscribing to “Really Simple Syndication” (RSS) feeds so you can easily keep up on what’s new at the Guardian, as well as at gazillions of other online news sources and blogs. That article also explains how to use web-based RSS services. In this article, I should another way to use RSS using only your web browser.

If you have an Apple Macintosh and are running a recent version of Mac OS X (i.e., “System 10”), then you have the Safari web browser, which has support for RSS built in. You can even read your headlines on your screen saver.

Likewise, if you have the Firefox web browser (which runs on both Mac and Windows), you also have RSS support — but they call it “Live Bookmarks.”

If you’re running Windows and using the Internet Explorer web browser version 6, you’re out of luck (at least until version 7 comes out). (But you can use a web-based RSS service, as explained in “Subscribe to the Guardian via its RSS feed.”) But, hey, Internet Explorer version 6 is so 2001. Why don’t you get a much better browser: Get Firefox!

Here’s the easy way to subscribe to, and read, all the new articles on the Grand Lake Guardian if you have Safari or Firefox:

  • Go to the Grand Lake Guardian’s All-in-1 page (or go to the front page at grandlakeguardian.org and click on the “Front Page” link at the top of the left column)
  • Look at the right-hand side of the address bar and you’ll see this icon (in Safari) or this icon (Firefox)
  • In Safari…
    • Click on the RSS icon () and you’ll see all the new articles in the Guardian as an RSS feed
    • Bookmark this RSS-feed page, using the Bookmarks menu, so that you can easily come back to it whenever you want
    • To see RSS feeds from other sites at the same time…
      • Create a new Bookmarks folder (again using the Bookmarks menu)
      • Save your Grand Lake Guardian RSS-feeds bookmark in that folder
      • Add to that folder the bookmarks for the RSS feeds from the other sites you care about
      • When you select that bookmarks folder, choose “View All RSS Articles” to see them all on one page.
  • In Firefox…
    • Click on the icon
    • Choose “Add 'RSS 2.0' as Live Bookmark…”
    • Select where you want this Live Bookmark to be saved
    • Then select this bookmark and choose “Open in tabs…” to read the articles

The above method shows you how to subscribe to all the articles at the Guardian. If, instead, you only want to subscribe to the feeds for one or more individual columns, you can do that to. Just go to that column’s page, and again find the RSS icon in the address bar and follow the same procedure.