Feeds

Many people seem to think that due to their time constraints, they have to decide on one pony news source to follow. This comes at a detriment to smaller or very specialized outlets—also it is completely unnecessary.

Say, you want to read Derpy Hooves News, Ponyleaks, and the Bronies for Good blog, but you’re also interested in the latest fanfics that are published on Equestria Daily. You can either check each site every few minutes, or you can leave all the drudgery to your feed reader.

Basic Instructions

First, you need such a feed reader. I think Google has enough of a monopoly that most of you probably can’t help but have at least one Google account. Let’s use that. (To sooth our collective conscience, please check out this comparison of feed aggregators when you have the time.)

1. Go to reader.google.com, where you may have to log in with your Google credentials.
2. Toward the upper left of the page, you’ll find a big red Subscribe button. Click it.
3. Paste or type the address of the page you are interested in into the field that will open below the button. Click Add.
4. Repeat for all the sites that interest you.

Voilà. Under Subscriptions you will henceforth find an aggregated stream of all the news you fancy.

Advanced Usage

Above I mentioned filtering Equestria Daily for fanfiction posts. For this you have to trust the staff to always label or tag these posts as Story. If that is the case, you can just paste the following URL into the Subscribe field, and you’ll be subscribed to fanfictions only. The “www” appears to be important. (Here is the corresponding Blogger Help entry.)

http://www.equestriadaily.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Story

No Google Account

If you have no Google account, kudos. Just look though the comparison of feed aggregators I already mentioned above. I don’t use Google Reader either, but a combination of Thunderbird (because it’s also my email client), RssDemon (on my phone), and Tiny Tiny RSS (for aggregation and resyndication on my server). Your email client or browser probably also has some sort of feed support, whether built-in or via an extension.