Welcome to the Lexicon. Here, you will find all the different bloggy terms that we use throughout this site.
Feed readers are programs that allow users to subscribe to RSS Feeds. There are both professional and free options available such as NetNews Wire for Mac or Omea Reader for PC.
To subscribe to an RSS feed in NetNewsWire, copy the web address you want to subscribe to, open the program, and click “subscribe.” If the site has a feed, NetNewsWire will detect it.
If for some reason you know a site has a feed, but NetNewsWire is not detecting it, you can use this simple workaround to make it behave properly.
Everyone’s favorite search engine, Google, uses a top-secret algorithm to determine which sites show up first when someone searches for a given term. What we do know is that some sites are assigned a higher PageRank than others based on how many people link to them, and the PageRank of those who do the linking.
PageRank goes on a scale from 0-10. If Steve starts a blog about his dog Brody today, that blog would have a PageRank of 0. Uberblogger Robert Scoble’s blog on the other hand has a pagerank of 7. Each number is worth 10 times the previous number, so an 8 is worth 100 times a 6, and so on.
To find out your PageRank, click here.
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s basically a broadcast mechanism for the Web. Sites that have RSS “feeds” send out a signal that notifies anyone who subscribes to it that the site has been updated. RSS comes standard with all blogging platforms today.
To learn how to subscribe to an RSS feed, see Feed Reader.
