Following on from my previous post about setting up your e-mail accounts inside Windows Live Mail, I am now going to take a new user through setting up their RSS feeds. My philosophy is this, why go chasing about online to find the news that you are interested in accessing, when you can have it delivered right to your doorstep? (desktop) So let’s set them up shall we?
1. Firstly, WINDOWS LIVE MAIL relies on Internet Explorer to sync its RSS feeds, so you must be using IE as your browser in order to enable them inside WINDOWS LIVE MAIL.
2. Now consider all of the sites that you regularly visit to gather news from. These could be news sites such as in my case the BBC, or your favourite forums that you often visit and contribute to, other peoples blogs or websites that you enjoy reading, and yes, even your own ‘WHAT’S NEW WITH YOUR NETWORK’ in WINDOWS LIVE! In fact,anything that interests you personally.
3. Start Internet Explorer and then browse to your favourite news site. For this how-to, I will use the BBC news site. Look for the small orange square on the Internet Explorer toolbar. If it remains grey then that particular site doesn’t have a RSS feed, if it changes to orange then it does contain an RSS feed. In my case, I want to find all the RSS feeds from the BBC, so I type into their search box, RSS NEWS FEEDS to be taken to the BBC’s RSS feeds page, where I can then choose which feeds I want to be able to read inside WINDOWS LIVE MAIL.
4. Click on the RSS feed that you want to subscribe to, and then when the subscribe window appears, just click on Subscribe and that feed will then be added to your RSS feeds list in both INTERNET EXPLORER and also in WINDOWS LIVE MAIL’s RSS feeds list.
5. Repeat this for any other website that you would like to receive updates for, including any forums that you subscribe to. Most of them usually support RSS feeds. Just look for the orange RSS feed square. If it appears orange in INTERNET EXPLORER’s toolbar, then that website contains an RSS feed.
6. Also you can enable the RSS feeds for all of your updates to your WHAT’’S NEW WITH YOUR NETWORK as well! Just visit your HOME page and click on the orange RSS feed square in INTERNET EXPLORER as before, and then subscribe to it.
7. Now close INTERNET EXPLORER, and start WINDOWS LIVE MAIL. Then click on the small orange square at the bottom of the MAIL FOLDER list.
8. Your RSS feeds will now be listed, and you can begin reading them. I usually change the default order of my feeds to ASCENDING so that the oldest feed is at the top of the list and the newest at the bottom, but you might prefer to leave it at the default of DESCENDING. Hmm, trouble is at the moment all that we can see is a very small summary of our news feeds! Well, let’s change that so we can see it fully as it would be displayed were we actually online.
9. Click on a RSS feed folder in your list, then click on MANAGE FEEDS from the TOOLBAR.
10. Now in the MANAGE YOUR FEEDS window that appears, click on the small arrow next to the first feed, then click on the actual feed itself below to bring up the EDIT FEEDS choice at the top of the MANAGE YOUR FEEDS window and then click on that.
10. Now you are in the EDIT RSS FEED window, so first of all tick the small square next to SHOW ARTICLES AS A WEB PAGE INSTEAD OF A SUMMARY, then move down and choose whether or not you want to use the default schedule for your RSS feeds to be updated in WINDOWS LIVE MAIL or alternatively choose a different time. I have my RSS feeds set to update every 15 minutes by default but if you want you can change this for each separate feed. The choices are as follows, every 15 minutes, every 30 mins, 1 hr, 4hrs, 1 day, 1 week or funnily enough never.
11. Lastly you can set how many feeds that you want WINDOWS LIVE MAIL to keep, either all of them or just the most recent items, and if you choose this last choice then you can state just how many RSS feeds you prefer to keep. I usually have this set at 50 so that they are more manageable.
12. Once you have chosen how you want the RSS feeds to look and be updated, then just click on OK. Now repeat this procedure for the rest of your feeds and then CLOSE the MANAGE YOUR FEEDS window.
Now when you choose a RSS feed from one of your RSS folders, your feeds appear as you would view them if you were online as a full web page in INTERNET EXPLORER. Not only that, when you are reading one of your friends SPACES blog post for example, and you decide that you would like to make a comment, then you can just click on the ‘SIGN IN’ inside the RSS feed page to be taken online where you can enter your comment! Now you can easily keep tabs on all of your news, any forums that you participate in, or all of your friends on your NETWORK and their latest updates and all without leaving your desktop!
Now isn’t that a whole lot easier? Next post we will set up some community NEWSGROUPS so that we can read what other users are doing with our favourite programs and even try to help other users if we can.
TG 
Essential for your everyday life! 
