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Most RSS feeds are updated sporatically, but some are updated constantly. When you want to subscribe to a very active RSS feed like a Digg search feed or comments feed, you need a subscription method that offers the shortest possible delay.

Personally, I use Google reader to manage most of my RSS subscriptions, but I have found that Google reader often experiences large delays between the time something is posted and the time it shows up. This is not good for feeds that are actively updated.

When you want to subscribe to active content, I think the best method is browser-based subscription, and my preferred browser for such subscriptions is Internet Explorer 7.

Now, it pains me to promote IE7 because I am an avid Firefox supporter and I do everything else on the internet through Firefox. But for some reason Firefox’s subscription features and even the most popular plugins I have tried just fall short of IE7 in this one area.

That said, here’s how you subscribe to a feed in IE7. For other browsers, you can follow similar procedures, but they will each work a little differently.

Note: This post is being written primarily for the benefit of my friends over at the option addict trading blog who often ask about subscribing to comments, so the examples below are taken from that blog.

1) First, find the address of the feed you want to subscribe to. You can usually do this by clicking on the subscribe button found on most blogs. Here’s an example:

Example of a subscribe to feed button found on a blog. Look for the little orange icon.

2) When you click this subscribe button, you will be taken to the feed page. (see note about potential problems with this in Firefox at the end of this post). The feed page may look like a bunch of crazy code, or it may look nice and neat, it depends on your browser. Either way, look up in the address bar and copy the entire address found there by highlighting it and hitting ctrl+C.

an example of a feed address

3) Open up Internet Explorer 7.

4) Paste the feed address into the address bar of IE7 and hit enter. When you access a feed in IE7, you will get a nicely formatted listing of the feed content and at the top, you will see some helpful information about the feed you are viewing and a link that says “subscribe to this feed.” Click that link.

The subscribe message displayed by IE7

5) Click the “favorites” icon at the top left (which looks like a yellow star) and when the favorites panel opens click the “feeds” button at the top. Then click the “docking” button to the right (the green arrow pointing left, see below) which will pin the feeds panel into the left side of your browser.

favorites panel showing the feeds tab, the list of feeds and the “docking” button to the right

6) Find your feed in the panel and right-click on it and select “properties.”

7) On the properties tab, you can set a few preferences for your feed. Select “use custom schedule” and set the frequency to “15 minutes”. This tells IE to check that feed every 15 minutes for new content.

That’s it. IE7 will check your feed every 15 minutes and if there is new content, you will see the name of the feed turn to bold. Then, you just click the name and the new entries will appear in chronological order in an easy to read format. If you want to check more often than every 15, you can “refresh” the feed by hovering over the name of the feed and clicking the “two green arrow” refresh icon that appears to the right of the feed name.

I apologize to mac users and fans of other browsers who won’t want to use IE7. Like I said, I don’t use IE7 for anything else except feed reading. Other browsers will have some form of subscribing built in, but most of them won’t auto-refresh as often and they are, in my opinion, more cumbersome to use. If you have specific questions about using a particular browser, please just leave me a comment and I will check it out for you.

** If you are having trouble accessing a feed page in Firefox, it is probably because Firefox is set to use “live bookmarks” to subscribe to feeds. I guess some people find live bookmarks useful, but I just think they are unnecessarily confusing. Anyway, to help, open Firefox and go to Tools –> Options and then click the “feeds” tab and select “No application selected.” This will tell Firefox to always ask you what you want to do when you try to access a feed, instead of assuming that you want to use live bookmarks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.