Dog Blog – Dog Product Reviews

Get a direct private feed that plugs you in to cool new products, the latest product reviews, and blog updates the instant they’re available. It’s fast, safe, private and spam free with RSS, the future of online communciation.

What is RSS?

For those who already have the reader, here’s our RSS URL: http://funstufffordogs.wordpress.com

For everyone else, RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It’s a way to read updated content from a website of your choosing. It comes to your computer through a feed on your desktop. The reader takes new information from our website and delivers it to an easy-to-read window on your desktop. There’s no need to subscribe to email lists, and there’s no need to revisit your favorite websites over and over to know what’s new.

How does it work?

It’s easy. You download a free piece of software that collects feeds of your choosing for you to read. (A “feed” is the information on a particular website that is delivered to your desktop by the reader).

You’ve probably already downlodaded Acrobat Reader so you could open PDF documents. This is the same idea. You download a free reader so that you can view updates on our site the instant they’re published.

Click here to download the reader we recommend for Windows. Click here for Linux. Click here for Mac (scroll to the bottom for the free version). Scroll to the bottom of this page for instructions on how to add our feed.

Why is RSS better than email?

1. It doesn’t junk up your in box. By having a direct feed, you can choose when you want to review the feeds and disregard those you’re not interested in. No need to delete spam emails or “clean out” your in box.
2. It’s faster than email. Updates are sent to your feed instantly, so you have faster acces to dog product reviews and new product announcements. RSS people will have the info before the email people get them. Sometimes, our specials include limited quantities; if we’re on your RSS feed, you’ll have first crack at those.
3. It’s easier than email. Once you download the reader, its icon is on your desktop. Simply click it and you’ll have instant access to the updates. No need to keep checking your email for updates, or checking in with different websites. From news to blogs to our product reviews, you can have all the stuff you’re most interested in come to you.
4. It’s searchable. Readers let you search by keyword, just like you do on the Internet. If you’re looking for an item that talked about Greenies, just type “Greenies” in the search window of your reader, and it will search title and contents of each item to prodice the one you’re looking for. Email doesn’t do that!
5. It’s more relaible than email. Many of the spam filters are not sophisticated enough to know what’s spam and what’s an email that you legitimately signed up for. You’ll never miss out on a sale again because a spam filter blocked your email (or stuck it in a spam folder that you didn’t get around to reading until weeks later). With an RSS feed, specials like our twice-yearly free shipping events, freebies, pre-Holiday sales and other high-demand deals will reach you when you need them.
6. It prevents your email address from being passed around. When you sign up for an email newsletter, you never know who else is going to get your email address. But RSS is a direct feed controlled by you. You tell your reader which feeds you want to receive. You receive only those. No other site can send their content to your reader. Websites don’t know who’s receiving their feeds, because you just past the code into your reader. You don’t request anything from the website, don’t sign up for anything, and you aren’t tracked in any way.
7. It’s easier to cancel or suspend the feed. Going on vacation? You can suspend the RSS Feed for a week. Messages won’t pile up in your in box. You control which feeds you get, right on your desktop. Want to cancel your feed from our site? No problem. There are no complicated forms to fill out, websites to visit or email messages to return. Just take the feed off your list of feeds and it’s gone instantly.

It’s free. It’s fast and easy. It’s safe and totally up to you which content you receive. 

We like it so much that we encourage you to use the RSS feed on our site rather than subscribing to our email newsletter.

How do I get started?

First, download the reader for Windows, Linux or Mac. For Windows users, save the reader in your programs folder, then put a shortcut on your desktop. As part of the download process, you’ll be asked to start choosing feeds that you’d like to get (i.e., Forbes, Wall Street Journal, NBC, etc.). You can choose any, all or none of the suggested feeds.

Now, open the reader and add a feed. For Windows users using the Feedreader, it’s under the File menu. Select New, then Feed. Copy and paste this URL into the reader: http://funstufffordogs.wordpress.com.

That’s it! Dog Blog should now be listed as one of your feeds. A few items will be loaded to get you started. Then, as new content is published, it will be sent to your reader instantly.

Questions? Call 940-597-1612 and we’ll try to walk you through the process or help you get started (we’re Windows based, so we may not be very knowledgable about Linux or Mac OS, but we’ll try). Or email lisa@funstufffordogs.com.