Syndication is a convenient way to keep up with websites that are frequently updated, like news sites and blogs. You can use it to keep up with many sites at once, or to keep up only with The GiveWell Blog. We recommend the latter.

People refer to syndication in a lot of different ways, including RSS, Atom, feeds, and XML feeds. We’ve found that most guides to syndication give lots of details about different protocols, readers, etc., rather than just telling you what to do to quickly take advantage, which is what we’re going to do. We haven’t looked into all the different options because we tried various tools from Google and thought they were good enough, so that’s what we’re going to cover.

Anywhere you see an icon like this , you’re looking at a link you can use for all the purposes below. One place you can find these kinds of links is on this page, on the sidebar at the left. Just right-click on the link, select “Copy shortcut,” and use that URL–we’ll call it the syndication URL–in one of the ways we’re about to cover.

The easiest way to take advantage of syndication is via your Google homepage. We’re talking about the “Personalized home” Google offers (via the right-hand corner of the vanilla search page), that can give you news, a calendar, email, and other widgets next to your search box. Just click the “Add stuff” link on this page, circled below:

Then choose the “Add by URL” option (tiny text next to the search box), and enter the syndication URL. The result will be a list of the most recent entries in the blog/news source/whatever, constantly updated, sitting on your Google homepage. You’ll never miss another one of our musings.

A more sophisticated way to take advantage of syndication is through a feed reader. This is an application designed specifically for reading and managing lots of feeds, sort of the way you manage your email: there is constant new content from lots of different sources, but it comes in sorted and formatted by your rules, not its own.

We don’t know much about the millions of different feed readers out there. We’re simple people, and we use the Google Reader. It’s pretty nice. You can click the “Add subscription” link, circled below, and enter our syndication URL; from then on, you’ll have our new blog entries sitting in your “inbox,” and you’ll never have to visit our site again.

And now for Holden’s favorite way to use syndication: combining the Google reader and the Google homepage for the ultimate in convenience. Once you’ve set up your Google reader, you can add a widget to your Google homepage that gives you quick, simple access to it. Just go “Add stuff” (like before) and search for “Google reader.” It won’t be hard to find.

Here’s what the result looks like:

And you can click on the widget to read all the new blogs and news as pop-up bubbles.

So what are you waiting for? Grab a syndication URL over on the left, plug it in somewhere, and lock GiveWell into your life!