Want to get instant notification whenever your friends post a new blogger entry? eHenke.com has individual RSS feeds for every user and an additional feed for the featured authors/photographers.

What is RSS?

by Warren

For those of you that noticed, eHenke.com now has RSS support. I’m guessing at least some of you don’t have any idea what that means. Think of RSS as an internet messenger service that runs in the background. With RSS, when you post a new article (journal, book review…whatever) a message gets sent to anyone who is monitoring your website with an RSS Reader.

Let’s say you have ten friends on eHenke.com (or on any website). If you want to see if they have posted anything new, you could go to their website and look at it. This could take a while if you are trying to monitor more than just a handful of sites. That’s where RSS can help you.

If you have an RSS reader (and I’ll give you some links) you can go to one place and see every update on ten, twenty, or a hundred different websites. It’s easy, fast, and really cool. And it doesn’t just work for personal websites like eHenke.com. I wanted to get a couple new monitors for my wife and kids and was monitoring Craigslist. Every time I found a good deal (a nearly new 19 inch CRT for less than $15), I’d call too late. It was already gone. I noticed Craigslist offers an RSS feed. It’s bright colored “RSS” text or an icon.

I clicked on the link, copied the address, and added it to my RSS reader. The particular RSS service I use emails me every time something changes…or something new is added. Now every time a new entry was added to Craigslist, I got an email. This was more than I wanted, so I added a filter to my email that automatically deleted every entry from Craigslist unless it had “monitor” in the body of the email. By the end of the weekend, I had 2 19 inch viewsonic monitors that look almost brand new. And I only paid $25…total!

So, if you want to monitor RSS via email, I’d suggest you head on over to www.squeet.com and set yourself up an account. Then under the reader section, add a feed url (copy the rss link from the website you want to track, like to track my site, use http://www.ehenke.com/xml.php?member=1). You get that link from the bright colored RSS link…most every websites out there have it now. Now, any time I add a new story or article, you will get an email notification!

If you’d rather not do this through email, take a look at bloglines.com. This does the same thing but instead of emailing, you’ll go to bloglines.com and see a list of all the sites you are tracking and be able to quickly see if new postings have been made (and even read part of them).

RSS is very cool. And everyone who has an account on eHenke.com automatically has their own RSS feed. You can get it right off your home page (the brightly colored RSS icon)!