Get RSS to save time blog, news surfing

Heal Your Church Website promotes “RSS in Plain English – a how-to video by Turtle Interactive”: an instructional video. I’ve been promoting RSS — news feeds, which includes blog — as a way of managing a potentially paralyzing amount of content. But it has been hard to describe. I suspect most of my readers get this blog by feed, either directly or through aggregation.

I only take one exception with the video: you can get your feeds fed to software on your computer. On the one hand, if you use an online service you can read your feeds anywhere with a browser. I like having the software — a feed reader — because I can search through them like a library. Preachers might like this better, as it provides a current quotation and illustration bank.  I use Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) which autodetects the feed from the main URL, saving a step in the video. The Sage plugin for the Firefox reader is a good option for light blog/news readers. There are other options.

Either way, you can get a feed of news stories filtered by keyword, like this one I get of Unitarian Universalist news stories.  There’s a link every time you do a search in Google News.

Lastly, job seekers take note. You can get from Indeed.com a feed of classified ads sorted by zip code, distance from it and keyword. It was how I got most of my job leads (though not the one that landed me my Day Job.)  For example, here are the job listings for “minister” within a 100 miles of 02108, the zip code of the Unitarian Universalist Association offices. Easier than going through a dozen job sites.

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