How To Enter or Confirm A Weblog Subscription

There are two ways you can choose to subscribe to a weblog with a format that is readable within Radio.

The two most common ways to subscribe are:

1. Click on a XML Coffee Cup that appears within a participating weblog. For instance, mine has one on the home page:

(The smaller XML link  displays a raw XML version of my page in your web browser. Go ahead and click that if you wish. Pretty hideous, eh? Nonetheless, this XML-formatted file is a beautiful thing to those with 'eyes to see'. Years of painstaking work - and not a few broken hearts - paved the way to this silly little icon.

As you will see momentarily, Radio reads the format of that file, works its magic on it and then gives you the results within your own weblog once you subscribe to my stuff. That said, you don't ever need to click that little XML icon. This was purely for extra-credit).

Clicking the XML Coffee Cup icon will route you to a Radio page within your local weblog. This page contains a list of your current subscriptions, if any, and allows you to confirm the selected subscription.

(Do you see in the URL field that Radio will use the 'rss.xml' format of my home page to ship the content to you?)

Do not change any of the URL text but make the confirmation by selecting 'Add'.

You do want to subscribe to my weblog, don't you? It's free. Whenever I add a new weblog post to my home page, Radio will send the actual content that appears on my web page for you to read on your News Aggregator page.

(You can read your News Aggregator page either from the Radio Command Menu at the top of any of your local weblog pages or from the News Aggregator link within your Status Center).

2. Click on the 'subscribed' link within the Status Center text on your local weblog home page:

Radio will route you to the same page but the URL field will be empty:

If you know the correct URL for the RSS feed, you can enter it directly. Most likely, you will want to copy-paste it from elsewhere on the Internet once you are sure that it is the correct URL.

It won't do just to enter the basic URL for a site. For instance, you can't subscribe to Dave Winer's Scripting News by typing this:

The red text is the message that displayed after I clicked the 'Add' button.

But you could have typed this into the field above and it would have worked perfectly: http://scripting.com/rss.xml.

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