What's the difference between the Subscription Options?
Subscribing through a feed reader (software or a Web site for reading feeds) is like subscribing by email in that you go to your feed reader's web page to view articles from your subscription like you would go to your email inbox to view articles sent to you. In both cases, you can have subscriptions from multiple sources like the New York Times and the Kent County Public Library collected in the same place and read them in the same way.
Here are the differences. With email you have to wade through spam and unrelated emails to find your articles. With feed readers, you control what articles come and what articles don't within the Feed Reader and you can organize them by their source. This means you will not receive spam within your feed reader and you will never continue to receive articles after you have unsubscribed, like you could (theoretically) with an email subscription. The feed reader gives you control over what comes instead of giving it to the people sending the content. Of course, no matter which option you choose, the library will honor any unsubscription request.
Feed Readers are becoming more and more popular for subscriptions because of these similarities and differences from email. Yet email still has a place that feed readers cannot fill: individual correspondence.
Just like not all Web sites offer email newsletters, not all Web sites offer news feeds for your feed reader. Look for an orange rectangle or square with RSS, XML, Atom, News Feed, etc to see if a Web site of interest offers a news feed. If you click this button or link, it will likely take you to a page with lots of text that may not make much sense to you. It's not supposed to. Ignore the text on the page and copy the Web Address of this page from the address bar into the appropriate place in your chosen feed reader. Congratulations, you have subscribed to the news feed.
Some popular feed readers include Alesti and Bloglines among others. If this option sounds interesting to you, go to their sites and read about them and if one sounds good, sign up. Then come back here for our feed's address and add it to your new feed reader.
For people not interested in using a feed reader, who want their subscriptions going to the same place as their individual correspondence, we offer the option of getting updates by email. Just enter your email address in the subscription box and follow the instructions provided. Each email you receive will have a link to unsubscribe.
Thank you for your interest in subscribing. Happy reading.