My Merry Christmas is pleased to introduce RSS feeds.
We just love being cutting edge. We're just not sure if folks get it. After all, there was a learning curve for us on this one and we've been online longer than any one.
So here we will explain how we understand
RSS and how you can use RSS to better access information from My Merry Christmas or other sites that offer it.
The experts are calling it the "wave of the future" on the Internet, the next big thing. We don't know about that but
after fiddling with it for a while we have to admit it is pretty cool. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It allows a standard by which a site like ours can provide links and information from our site and have it posted just about anywhere. A good example of RSS is right here on My Merry Christmas' Merry Forums -- we take the RSS feeds from All Recipes.com and place them in our forum for our site readers to enjoy.
But RSS is more than just a way for sneaky webmasters to swipe stuff from each other. The average web surfer can get their favorite information faster and better organized by subscribing to a site's RSS feeds.
For example, I am constantly searching for anything Christmas online. In year's past, I have to browse a long list of "favorite links" and look at each site individually -- a very time consuming and not-very-efficient task. Using a new piece of software called a feed reader I can subscribe to sites offering feeds and see them organized just how I want them in one little list. So now, I can see all the news, features and updated offerings all at one time in one place at the push of a button. It is pretty slick.
Any site that offers RSS will use a little graphic like this: 
to signal to those geeks like me that they have a RSS feed available. More and more of these little images are popping up on web pages everywhere.
What I have found myself doing is gathering these feeds and using them now for all the information that is important to me on a regular basis -- news, weather, sports, forums, etc. Wherever I go I look now for that graphic and feed info so that I can transfer the feed into my reader. As a result I often spend more time looking at stuff in my feed reader than I do via my browser.
One day I caught myself using my feed reader for more than an hour, and then it dawned on me: if I'm doing this, how many other people are doing this? I've read all this stuff without seeing a single web page. I have not clicked the mouse other than to scroll through the stuff that I just want to read. That is when I decided that RSS would be coming to MY web sites.
Currently we offer RSS in two places -- the What's New page and via the Merry Forums. With these two feeds you can see a list of links of new features on My Merry Christmas or you can read all the new posts in the Merry Forums in your reader.
To get into this, you will need an aggregator, a fancy word meaning "feed reader". Many readers are free for downloading from hundreds of sources online. Google "free RSS reader" or something similar and you are sure to find plenty of choices. I have used Feed Reader and it works fine for me. I don't know if this is the best one available on the market but I find it sufficient for my needs.
Some major sites such as MSN, Google, and Yahoo are now integrating RSS into their services. If you use My Yahoo, for example, as a launch point for your Internet browsing you now have the capability of placing any kind of RSS feed you want into your Yahoo personalized page. How cool is that? Your My Merry Christmas headlines can appear right next to your news and weather.
While we have gone RSS crazy, or so it would seem, here at My Merry Christmas we admit being new to it still. We need your feedback to better format it and to offer feeds that will be useful. We encourage contact from our site users who are enabled with this new technology so that we can offer what people want.
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Current My Merry Christmas Feeds:
Christmas in the News
Recent Posts on the Merry Forums
| Additional Resources Provided byFind Christmas
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