Feed the world
Sharing your digital content by using RSS feeds
Like most people, you probably have hundreds—if not thousands—of digital pictures that you don't share with your family and friends because of all the time it takes. Just to send out a batch of birthday pictures to your family you might have to:
| • | Resize and edit the pictures for e‑mail. |
| • | Write the e‑mail message. |
| • | Figure out which e‑mail addresses you want to send the pictures to. |
| • | Either send only a few photos because the e‑mail message is too large to send or send
multiple e‑mail messages. |
But what if you had one place on the Internet you could send people to for picture updates? What if they could subscribe to this location—like an electronic newspaper or magazine—and see when new pictures were available? You can do this today using a Windows Live Spaces RSS feed.
What you need to get started
To create an RSS feed, you will need the following:
| • | A Windows Live Spaces account. Windows Live Spaces is a place on the Internet where you can share photos and other information with friends. This type of place is
sometimes referred to as a social networking website. |
| • | An Internet connection (preferably a broadband connection, since pictures can sometimes take a long time to transfer from your computer to Windows Live Spaces). |
| • | A web browser that includes an RSS feed reader, such as Internet Explorer 7. |
| • | An e‑mail account. |
Finding your feed address
When you create a Windows Live Spaces account, your feed is created automatically and
assigned a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Here's how you find your feed's URL:
| |
| | 1.
| Sign in to Windows Live Spaces, and then click Your space. | | 2.
| Click the Options drop-down list, and then click Space settings. | | 3.
| Under Syndicate this space, select Syndicate this space. If this is not selected,
then your space cannot be read by aggregators.  | | Select the Syndicate this space check box |
An aggregator is software that is used to read syndicated web content supplied in the form of a web feed. | | 4.
| Write down or copy and save your syndication URL. | | 5.
| To view your feed, copy and paste the syndication URL into a web browser that
includes a feed reader, such as Internet Explorer 7. If you haven't created any Windows Live Spaces blog entries or Photo albums before,
then this webpage will be empty. |
|
Add some pictures
Now that you have your feed prepared for syndication, you can add some photos:
| |
| | 1.
| On your spaces page, click Share photos. | | 2.
| Click Add album, and then click Add photos. If prompted, install the Windows Live Photo Upload Control. | | 3.
| Select photos from your computer to add to the album, and then click Save and
close. |
|
Go to your feed URL. The photos you just posted show up
automatically as a Photo Album entry.
Tell the world
All you need to do now is send the URL to people and ask them
to subscribe to it.
| To subscribe to a feed using a feed URL |
| | 1.
| Open Internet Explorer by clicking the Start button  , and then clicking Internet Explorer. | | 2.
| Type the address of the feed URL you want to subscribe to. | | 3.
| Click the Subscribe to this Feed button  . | | 4.
| Click Subscribe to use the default name and location for this feed. If you want to change the name and location, type a name for the feed and select a folder to create the feed in. If you do not have any folders for RSS feeds, click New Folder to create a folder. |
|
After you subscribe to a feed, it will be added to your web browser's or feed reader's list of feeds. In Internet Explorer 7, the feed title's font turns bold when updated content is available from that feed. In addition, once you subscribe to a feed, Internet Explorer provides the Common Feed
List to other programs. This allows you to subscribe to feeds with Internet Explorer and
read them in other programs, such as e‑mail clients, or the Windows Sidebar.
For more information about using feeds, see Using feeds (RSS).
Broadband connection
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Broadband connection
A high-speed Internet connection. Broadband connections are typically 256 kilobytes per second (KBps) or faster. Broadband includes DSL and cable modem service.
Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
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Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
An address that uniquely identifies a location on the Internet. A URL is usually preceded by http://, as in http://www.microsoft.com. A URL can contain more detail, such as the name of a page of hypertext, often with the file name extension .html or .htm.
Help and How-to
