WARNING! This isn’t going to be your typical Lifetime365 blog post. It’s going to be a bit more technical, and a lot more geeky, but don’t let that scare you off. I’ll try and walk you through it.
To start things off, you should know that I’m a computer geek, I’ll admit it. What I’m going to tell you now is something that us geeks have known about for a long, long time, but something that you “normal” people probably don’t know about – and even if you do, you’re probably not using it this way.
What is this “secret technology” of which I speak? It’s called RSS feeds. RSS is an acronym. I’d tell you what it stands for but people have been arguing over that since it first came out. Then “ATOM feeds” came along. All of this ties in with “RDF” and the “semantic web”. I’m not going to go into that much detail, just know that when someone talks about RSS, ATOM, or RDF, they’re probably talking about the same thing. These are different formats of XML data feeds – or “feeds” for short.
Still with me?
What exactly are feeds? Feeds are basically all the information or data on a web page without all the design, and you don’t even have to view them in your web browser.
Here’s where things get cool – and can help you save a ton of money.
Let’s say you really like the stuff that we sell on BuyLifetime.com and you’re always looking for a deal, so once a week you check out our Clearance Items. That’s a great way to get a killer deal on some primo Lifetime products! But, sometimes we only post a few of any given item up there, and by the time you check the item you want may be sold out. Ah! That’s where feeds come in!
Instead of visiting the BuyLifetime.com Clearance Items page every week (or every day), you can subscribe to the Clearance Items Feed (no, feed subscriptions don’t cost money like magazine subscriptions do).
Once you’ve subscribed to our feed (I’ll get to how exactly you do that in just a minute) every time we add a new item your feed reader (or “aggregator”) will notify you. Yes, you read that correctly: when we add something new, our feed will notify you!
If that wasn’t cool enough, we’re not the only ones doing it! That’s right, if you’re also interested in some other type of product that we don’t sell (fishing gear, for example), all you’ve got to do is find your favorite fishing gear clearance items site, and subscribe to that feed. Then any time any of your favorite sites add a new clearance item, you’ll know – and without having to visit a dozen separate website. Talk about a time-saver!
Of course, you can also get sports feeds, news feeds, photo feeds, and other kinds of feeds, too. But we’re talking about clearance items. :)
So, how do you subscribe to a feed? Go to the page that you’re looking for in your web browser (Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox, Opera, or Safari) and look in the address bar. Do you see a little, orange and white “feed flair” icon? If you do, click on it to see what feeds are available for that page. There might be more than one feed, and/or more than one format, don’t be confused, click on the one that looks like it’s what you’re looking for (when in doubt choose RSS 2.0).
Here’s what it looks like on BuyLifetime.com:
Give it a try, let me know how it works for you!