How Do I?
Got a question? Not sure what something is? Take a look at these FAQs. If the answer you seek is not among them, email us at info@thelightyears.com and we’ll help you out!
With so much information now available at the press of a button, how do you organise what you want to read from what you don’t want to read? RSS Feeds were invented to deal with this problem.
When websites have stories that are constantly changing – like the news and blogs on this website – you can choose to subscribe to an RSS feed in order to have the stories collected to be read at a single location. This is your RSS Reader.
RSS Readers are a bit like email inboxes and come in different forms.
- You can set up an online reader such as Google Reader
- You can have your RSS Feeds listed in a web browser such as Firefox
- You can have your RSS Feeds delivered to your email inbox using Feedburner
(To use Feedburner to subscribe to LYs stories, enter your email address in the box on the right)
Any page with RSS content will have an RSS logo in the address bar of your web browser and will often have another logo on the page somewhere. You subscribe to a feed by clicking on the logo and copying the address into your reader. RSS logos look like this:
Click to subscribe to The Lightyears’ RSS Feed
For more information try http://www.whatisrss.com.
Twitter is the next big thing in social networks – just ask the Americans! If you use Facebook, you’ll be used to the Status Update feature where you state what you’re doing / how you’re feeling / what you’re thinking for all Facebook users to see. Twitter is the same idea but for anyone to see.
The way it works is that once you sign up you can ‘follow’ other Twitterers, which means you get sent notifications whenever they post an update. These notifications can be sent to your mobile phone or email account or can be subscribed to as an RSS feed. You might see it referred to as ‘microblogging’ because you only get 154 characters to say what you have to say.
You don’t have to sign up to Twitter to see it in action – the latest ‘tweet’ from The Lightyears appears at the top of every page on this website.
Sign up to Twitter by clicking here.
If you read a story on The Lightyears website that you think might be of interest to somebody else you know, you can click the SHARE box that appears below the story. The box looks like this:
Moving your mouse over the button causes a list of Social Networks to appear. The list includes websites most people are familiar with (MySpace and Facebook) as well as a link to send a direct email and links to specific Social Bookmarks such as Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. The idea of these sites is to allow you to share, tag and store links from all corners of the internet. Why might you want to do this?
- Find a site or story you like by bookmarking it and keeping your bookmarks in a single online location
- Share stories that interest you easily with people you know
- By sharing based on the tags or subject of the story it is easy to find more stories of particular interest to you
Social Bookmark sites generally require you to register, although registration is free. Each site operates in a slightly different way so you might need to experiment to find the one that’s best for you.
For more information, check out Wikipedia’s article on Social Bookmarking.
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