RSS Subscribe

Subscribing to the AMS Webhosting RSS Feed

Special Note: These instructions are for the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client which also has an RSS aggregator that can be used to stay up-to-date with the latest RSS feeds. A lot of users may be using Outlook Express 7.0, which I believe also has an RSS aggregator, but Outlook Express 7.0 is only available on Windows Vista. I currently do not have a Windows Vista system with which I can write a guide based off of, so I am only going to do a Thunderbird guide at this time. If you are using Outlook Express 7.0 or if you are using any other e-mail client or RSS aggregator, then maybe these instructions will work as a guide to achieving the same subscription results.

RSS feeds can work in a similar manner that an announcement mailing list would work. The plus side that RSS feeds have over announcement mailing lists is that end users are pulling data from the server rather than having data pushed onto them. For example, if you subscribe to an announcement mailing list or have an announcement mailing list that you are administering, then users who subscribe to that list are having information push onto them. As an administrator of this list, when you send a message to the list, that message gets pushed to the subscriber, regardless of whether or not that user wants to read the message. Obviously, subscribers should be responsible for knowing when they subscribe to a list and if they no longer want to receive messages from the list, then they should unsubscribe from the list. However, sadly, this is not always the case. It has been our experience that a lot of users will subscribe to an announcement list, then forget that they signed up for it or just generally start flagging those messages as spam messages. This results in our servers becoming blacklisted. With an RSS feed and an announcement blog like this, you never run into this issue. This is because posts and announcements are never pushed onto the subscriber, when a subscriber starts their e-mail program or RSS aggregator, the application connects to our server and pulls posts from our server. If an end user or subscriber wishes to no longer receive these messages, they just simply unsubscribe from the RSS feed. There is never an issue where the posts can be flagged as spam that can result in our server being blacklisted.

This guide will detail how to subscribe to our AMS Webhosting RSS feed using the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client.

When you start Thunderbird click on the Tools menu and select Account Settings. You will see a dialog box that looks like:

Now click Next. The next dialog box will just ask you to name the account, by default the account is named News & Blogs. Generally this is sufficient. After you set this, click Next. You
will then see a final dialog box telling you that the account has been set up. Click on Finish. You will be brought back to the Account Settings dialog box where you will see a new item in the lef
t frame, titled News & Blogs or whatever you named the account in the last step. Click on it to highlight it. If you have previously added RSS Feeds or News Feeds in Thunderbirds then you would already s
ee this and you would want to proceed on from here to add our RSS Feed to your list.

Now click on the Manage Subscriptions… button. A new dialog box will show up.

If you have previously set up RSS Feeds, then you may see some listed here. At any rate, you want to click on the Add button. You will see the dialog box asking you for the Feed URL.

You want to set the Feed URL to:

http://blog.amssupport.info/?feed=rss2 When you set the Feed URL, click on OK. You will then see the RSS Subscriptions dialog box again, but this time it will contain the feed for our AMS Webhosting Blog. Click on the X in the u
pper right-hand corner of the dialog box to close out the dialog box. You can then click OK on the Account Settings dialog box to close it. Then in your Thunderbird setup you will see the AMS W
ebhosting feed listed under the News & Blogs title in your list of accounts in Thunderbird.

You have now successfully subscribed to the AMS Webhosting RSS Feed. Thunderbird will check the RSS feed on a routine basis for new posts and if a new post is made, then it will be accessible from within Thunder
bird. You can also always check for new announcements by going to http://blog.amssupport.info. This helps you stay up-to-date with all of the happenings
at AMS Webhosting.

If at any time you want to unsubscribe from the RSS feed, you can simply use the Manage Subscriptions button in the Account Settings and Remove the AMS Webhosting blog.