Yahoo members may be pleased to learn that this newsletter and many others can easily be added to My Yahoo, a personalized home page service offered by the online portal giant.
Many electronic publications, including this newsletter, are available in RSS (Really Simple Syndication), or blog, format. That is, not only are they available as normal web pages, but they also are available as specialized data feeds in a standard format that can be read by many other programs and online services. These "newsreaders" typically add several publications together (or "aggregate" them) so that a person can quickly and easily see the headlines from all at the same time. A quick mouse click or two displays the full articles of interest. Use of a newsreader and RSS data feeds typically gives you much faster and easier ways of finding the information that interests you, especially when compared to the slow method of navigating from one web site to the next in a normal web browser.
Today Yahoo announced that the company is adding RSS data feeds to "My Yahoo," a method by which each Yahoo member can add more information to his or her personalized home page. The service is already available to many Yahoo users and will be rolled out to the remaining users over the next two or three weeks.
If you are not yet a user of My Yahoo, go to http://www.yahoo.com and click on "My Yahoo" to sign up. My Yahoo is a free service.
If you already use Yahoo's free personalized home page, you can add this newsletter to that page by the following steps:
- Go to http://www.yahoo.com
- Click on "My Yahoo" near the top of the page, and log in with the user ID and password you created earlier.
- Update your page to the new My Yahoo page by clicking on "update your page now." (If you do not see that link, then you are already using the new My Yahoo.)
- Click on "Add Content" on the left side of the screen, about an inch and a half down from the top.
- A box appears that is labeled "Find Content." Enter the letters "eogn" (without the quotes), which stands for "Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter," and then click on FIND.
- Click on ADD Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter.
- Click on FINISHED, or else go look for other RSS channels that are of interest to you.
After you complete these steps, this newsletter's articles will be available on your My Yahoo page. In my case, the newsletter articles first appeared at the very bottom of the page. However, the placement of all items on the My Yahoo page can be changed as you wish. I moved the newsletter articles to the top of My Yahoo page; you may wish to move them some place else. To move the articles higher on the page, click on EDIT to the right of the title "Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter," and then click on MOVE UP. I had to do that six or eight times to move the articles to the top of My Yahoo. The next time you go to My Yahoo, you will see this newsletter's headlines in the location you specified. Clicking on any headline will then display the full article.
While I have described the method of adding this newsletter to My Yahoo, the same instructions should work for any news feed available in RSS or ATOM format. The available publications include well known giants, including CNN, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Wired Magazine. You will also find stock market reports, local weather reports, and more than 150,000 other, smaller e-publications, all available as RSS data feeds, allowing you to find the information of interest quickly and easily in My Yahoo.
When I checked, Yahoo listed 86 different genealogy data feeds in RSS format. To see them all, click on "Add Content" and then type "genealogy" (without the quotes) in the search box.
