To use My Yahoo, you need a free Yahoo account. It only takes a minute to set up, and it includes a free Yahoo email address with tons of storage. If you don’t already have an account, you can set it up at the same time that you use the My Yahoo feed reader.

My Yahoo lets you create a customized Yahoo page with all sorts of content from Yahoo and elsewhere on a broad range of topics. For now, we’re just going to focus on reading RSS feeds from outside of Yahoo:

Go to http://my.yahoo.com. If you already have a Yahoo account, enter your Yahoo ID and password, otherwise click on the Sign Up link and follow then instructions, then sign in with your ID and password.

Click on the Add Content button near the top of the screen. You’ll be taken to another page to help you find RSS content to put onto your My Yahoo page. From there, you can enter a search term or browse Yahoo feeds from a variety of topics.

To add an RSS feed where you already know the URL, click on the Add RSS by URL link next to the Find button. Do that now, then enter the URL of my RSS (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Free-RSS-Resources) into the URL box which appears, then click the Add button. You’ll then see a preview of the articles in my feed and be given a choice to add (with another Add button) the feed to your page or not (with the No Thanks button). Click the Add button, then Go to My Yahoo and you’ll see your current My Yahoo page with the new RSS content in a box at the bottom. You can rearrange the contents of this page to your heart’s content and also configure how many articles from each feed are shown when you go to your page. From now on, every time you log in to your My Yahoo page, the latest articles from the feeds you’ve selected will be there for you to read.

If you don’t know the exact URL of a feed, or even the name of it, enter a topic in the Find Content box instead of clicking Add RSS by URL. To find my feed above, you could enter free RSS resources in the Find Content box and click the Find button. This will give you a choice of related feeds to preview and select from.

Now suppose you’re out there surfing the web, and you come across a site with an RSS feed that you want to add to the My Yahoo page. You can either:

Copy the feed URL from the orange XML or RSS button (as I mentioned earlier) and paste it into the My Yahoo Add RSS by URL form, or

You can look for a My Yahoo button on the site you’ve surfed to. If you find a My Yahoo button, just click on it directly. This will take you into the My Yahoo area, display a preview of the feed’s headlines and give you the option to add the feed or not, as above. If you’re not currently signed in to your Yahoo account when you click the My Yahoo button, you’ll be prompted to sign in first.

That’s all there is to it!

——————–

Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Powered by iPowerWeb. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.