How to Customize Google with RSS…

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the method by which websites syndicate their news. You’ll frequently see the letters RSS or a small RSS icon on a web site. It might be XML, something, for all intents and purposes the same.

CNN has their RSS at the bottom of the page. If you click it it will take you to www.cnn.com/services/rss/. That LINK is what you want to paste into your Google personalized homepage if you want to RSS CNN news into your site.

To do this, go to your Google personalized page. You will find a link on the right that says, “Add stuff.” When you click it, it has tons of stuff you can add. But you want to look near the search field for “Add by URL.” Click that and then you can insert the RSS feed info from CNN or GantDaily or whatever. To put ShieldsGroup’s RSS into your Google page, you’d paste www.shieldsgroup.com/blog/?feed=rss2 into that field.

Part of the beauty of RSS is that you can choose the kind of news you want. For example, if you want Steelers news from KDKA, you can go to http://kdka.com/steelers and look for RSS (on the right, just less than halfway down as of this writing). Click on “Click here to subscribe to our Steelers RSS feed” and copy the URL (kdka.com/steelers/resources_blogrss.xml) to your clipboard, then drop it off on the “Add by URL” on your Google page described above.

It’s a little laborious at first, but it’s worth the work to get the kind of news you want.

10 thoughts on “How to Customize Google with RSS…

  1. Have you tried Linux yet Steve? I am going to be converting a computer over to it next month. My servers use Linux and never crash as opposed to windows based servers. The open source code project has really started to catch on. I understand it is upward of 30 million Linux users now.

  2. 30 Million users? That’s what this ad says:


    Yes. I have had a Linux box running Ubuntu here since September, I thnk. It works pretty well. However, it’s probably not quite ready for prime-time. Flash is a little iffy sometimes.

  3. That commercial is clever. I thought it was going to be penguin standing there going “Skwaaak Skwaaak”.

    What’s up John? How you been? What distro of Linux are you using there? I’ve been using Debian Sarge on my mail server at work for about four years now, and it is the best. I prefer the Debian/Ubuntu because of their package managers. We used RedHat/Fedora at first, but RPM doesn’t match up to apt-get.

  4. Y’all realize that using software like that requires knowledge that I do not posses and do not intend to acquire, right?

    I’ll stick with my XP, firefox and thunderbird…and I customized my Google page last night, so life is good. 🙂

  5. 🙂
    I don’t have any problems with XP. In fact, I have no plans to upgrade to Vista, XP is all I’ve ever dreamed of, I am a very happy camper.

    You know, of course, that tonight it will not only crash, but wipe my hard drive and call me names.

  6. First time for me.
    I get this error message in outlook 2007 every time I open it.
    “There was a problem reading one or more of your reminders. Some reminders may not appear. ”
    How do I delete all reminders in a batch.
    Graeme

  7. Hey thanks for the tip, because I understand there are quite a few versions/distributions of it.

    I almost went with the redhat so appreciate the heads up! I am just waiting for xp to become unstable now vista is out, to force conversion and I am not interested.
    The family is doing well, going to Harrisburg this weekend, then the girls are going to florida for a week to catch some sun, me-headed for the mountains……
    Good to see you yesterday Matt and hopefully I will see you on Thursday Steve.

    You can find my blogsite now at http://reformedville.reformedblogs.com/

    John

Comments are closed.