My Yahoo! Blog

All your faves on one page (Part 2 of 3)

Last week, we covered how to track your favorite blogs and sites with Add To My Yahoo buttons. But what about sites that don’t have these magic buttons?

Fortunately, you can still see all your favorite blogs and sites on My Yahoo! via the magic of RSS.

What is RSS? It stands for Real Simple Syndication, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that many of your favorite sites offer RSS feeds that you can put directly on your My Yahoo! page, often with just one or two clicks.

Here’s how I do it:

Step 1. I’m a big nerd, so I like the blogs at economist.com , the online property of the venerable magazine The Economist. So I navigate to the page and look for the RSS logo. In most cases it appears directly on the page and looks like this:

It can also appear directly in the browser toolbars like this:

Step 2. I click on the RSS logo, and see the feed in my browser.

Firefox makes it easy to add the feed to My Yahoo!. Just click the Subscribe Now button and the feed will appear on your My Yahoo! page.

To make it even easier, check “Always use My Yahoo to subscribe to feeds,” and next time Firefox will add the feed to your My Yahoo! automatically.

Internet Explorer adds an extra step, but it’s still “real simple.” When you’re viewing the feed in the browser, just copy the URL of the feed from the address bar. Then go to My Yahoo!, click “Add Content” and then “Add RSS Feed”. Then paste the feed URL into the form and click “Add”. You’re done.

That’s it! My beloved blog is on my page. Now every time it updates, I’ll see it when I start my browser.

You can add all your favorite blogs, Twitter feeds, craigslist searches – anything with an RSS feed – to your My Yahoo! page. And you don’t even have to remember what RSS stands for.

Next week we’ll cover how to track your friends online. Won’t they be pleased?

Eric
- My Yahoo! Product Manager

All your faves on one page (Part 1 of 3)

How would you like to see all your favorite blogs and sites in one place? That’s what My Yahoo! can do.

The easiest way is by clicking on Add to My Yahoo! buttons, which you can find on thousands of blogs and other websites. They look like this:

If you’re signed into your My Yahoo! page, one click on the button will add the content to your page.

Check it out. Here’s how I do it.

Step 1: I’m a huge fan of Rod “BOOM THO” Benson’s work on the hilarious basketball blog, Ball Don’t Lie.

See the Add to My Yahoo! button on the right? One click and the blog is automatically added to your page!

Step 2: That looks good. I’ll keep it!

There’s my favorite hoops blog on My Yahoo! Next time I come to the page, I’ll see the freshest posts from Ball Don’t Lie.

I can even drag it to my Sports & Entertainment tab, and expand it to the last ten stories by clicking the Module Options icon (the little gear in the upper right of the module).

Next week: How do you add sites that don’t have Add To My Yahoo! buttons? We’ll show you how to do it easily via the magic of RSS.

Eric
- My Yahoo! Product Manager