The Latest Spanish Property News from Kyero.com
July 29th, 2008
It's that time of year again when we all get a break from the Property Pulse Newsletter (collective sighs of relief). I'll be sending out the next newsletter on September 2nd, but in the meantime, new articles will continue to be added to the pages of our news section, every business day.
If you prefer your Spanish property news to come to you, rather than you going looking for it on the Kyero.com web site, now is a good time to grapple with the beast known as RSS.
Wait, don't stop reading, I'm going to talk you through it - step by step. Really, you'll be pleased you carried on reading.
The problems with email
Before we get into How to - let's think about Why to.
Email is undoubtedly the most useful part of the Internet for many people. As a direct replacement for sending a letter, it's much better in lots of important ways. However, because everyone uses email, it has gathered some nasty parasites along the way - SPAM, viruses and phishing.
These and other annoyances impede the usefulness of email to the extent that there's no guarantee that the email you send will ever reliably arrive at its destination.
As I write this, my Gmail account contains a little under 20,000 SPAM emails - received in the last 30 days. If Gmail didn't do such a great job of detecting and hiding these messages from me, email would now be useless as a communication tool.
Some estimate the percentage of lost email to be as high at 50%. The nub of the problem is the push nature of email - the sender pushes the email to the receiver - whether or not the receiver wants it.
The quantity of paper junk mail that arrives through your letter box is regulated, to some extent, by the real costs of printing and postage. However, email is free of those costs and, as a consequence, a huge number of unsolicited commercial messages, viruses or attempts to gain access to your personal details are pushed at you as email every day.
Side-stepping SPAM
Rather than waging war on unwanted email, there is a way to completely side-step the problem. There is another approach to make sure that you ALWAYS receive the information you want and NEVER receive messages you don't want.
It works a lot like email but, because you specify the subjects you're interested in, you only see that information, and nothing else. You have complete control over what you see and you can switch the flow of information on or off at any time.
No SPAM, no viruses, no phishing.
The reason that most people don't know about this pull method of communication is that it looks complicated - and most people get scared off before they ever get to the good stuff.
You've probably heard of RSS already and, if you're like most people, you're still wondering what it is, what it's for and why you should care. That's because RSS is a part of the machinery that you just don't need to know about - like the darkest parts of your car's engine compartment or the plumbing in your house.
Just like plumbing, RSS is an essential piece of infrastructure - but you're not interested in the pipework, you want the shower, the bath, the kitchen sink - the bits that make use of the plumbing. So, for now, let's forget about RSS and look at the things that make use of it. I'm going to focus on Google Reader (because it's the one I use).
Here's what we're going to do - I hope you'll play along.
- Set up a Google Account
- Set up Google Reader
- Tell Google Reader about the stuff you're interested in
- Marvel at how much time you'll save
- If you're having trouble switching between windows while following these instructions, here's a printer friendly version of this article
Set up a Google account. You'll see this box where you can sign-in if you already have an account, or an option to create one at the bottom.
The account creation process is pretty straightforward, so I'm going to assume that you now have a Google account, you've entered your email address and password and clicked Sign in.
Once signed-in, you'll arrive at a page showing all the Google products you could play with (there are a lot of them). For now, we're only interested in the one called Reader - just click the Reader link.
Here's the first point where you might be tempted to give up - but don't be put off by the blank screen and the messy layout - you're just one step from turning this page into your personalised single-page-view of the entire Internet - honest.
Look for this green button on the left-hand-side of the screen and click Add subscription - this is where you tell the Reader about the stuff you're interested in.
Since you're reading this, I'll assume you're interested in the Kyero Spanish Property News, so paste this link into the box and click the Add button: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kyero_news
For now, don't worry about where that link came from - I'll show you that once you've actually made Google Reader do something useful. You can see why most people never get this far, can't you? I'm glad you're sticking with it though :)
If all has gone well, you're now looking at a Kyero.com news article in the centre of your screen - something like this (although your article will be a more recent one).
As you scroll down the Reader page, you'll see other news article from Kyero.com, and, as you scroll past them, Google Reader will automatically know that you have read them so that when you come back to the page, they will be hidden from view
You can also see a list of all the articles in your reader, just click the List view in the top-right-corner:
So far, so good, but all you've really done is viewed the Kyero.com news page in a different format. The good stuff starts to happen as you add more subscriptions to the reader.
Let's say you're interested in property for sale in Almuñcéar. Go to the green subscription box on the left-hand-side of your Google reader and paste this link in there - just as you did before. http://www.kyero.com/rss/pgn1ppp20slt0srt4twn23521
Again, don't worry about where that link came from for now. Click the Add button and, with luck and a following wind, you'll see something like this in the Expanded view of your Google Reader:
For good measure, let's add one more subscription - to show you that this isn't a Kyero thing - it's useful right across the Internet. Paste this link into the green subscription box, just as before: http://feeds.feedburner.com/nubricks-property
Now, in the Expanded view, see how the articles from Nubricks, Kyero news and Kyero properties are interspersed in your reader? That's because the reader defaults to displaying the most recent articles first. You can change that behaviour by clicking the View settings at the top of the page.
Looking at the left-hand-side of the reader, underneath the green subscription button, you can see a list of the channels you're subscribed to.
Essentially, Google Reader works like your personalised, single-page view of the entire Internet. By selecting the subscriptions you're interested in, this single page will automatically keep itself updated.
By adding subscriptions from The BBC, The Telegraph or your favourite sports web sites, you can keep updated on all your interests by visiting a single reader page. The advantages of you pulling the information you want instead of having it pushed at you via email are;
- No SPAM, viruses or phishing
- No missing or lost information
- Viewing a single page instead of many web pages
- Complete control and anonymity
.. And all that without you needing to know about RSS, the plumbing behind all of this. All you really need to know is how to find the RSS links which we've been pasting into the green subscription box.
Here's how to find the RSS link for Kyero news. Visit the Kyero.com news page and, in the top-right-corner, you'll see a box like this:
On the news page, hover your mouse over the icon or link and you'll see the link we pasted into the Google Reader subscription box previously: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kyero_news
You can copy it by right-clicking on the link and selecting Copy shortcut. You can then switch to Google Reader and paste this link into the subscription box. Alternatively, you can just click the link to add the subscription to Google Reader or a number of other readers.
Click here to visit the Kyero results page for property for sale in Almuñécar - you'll see a box like this in the top-right-hand corner. Again, by hovering over the link and the icon you'll see the link which we previously added into Google Reader.
By now, you've figured out that you're looking for this RSS icon. Wherever you see it, you can click or right-click to add information from that page into your Google reader, or any other RSS reader for that matter.
By gradually including and refining the web pages that you subscribe to via RSS, you're essentially creating a constantly updated newspaper, unique to you. This newspaper only contains the sections you want to read, is free and stores an unlimited number of articles until you're ready to read them.
Unlike email, there's no junk to deal with and no worries about security. Compared to visiting each of these subscriptions individually, you save time and effort in accessing the articles you most want to read.
I've only scratched the surface of what RSS readers are capable of. There's a lot more information in the help section of Google reader which will be worth browsing if you have the time and inclination.
My intention has been to get you over the initial tricky stuff that often gets in the way of people starting to use RSS - past the plumbing of how it works - and into the good stuff of why to use it.
Is email dead? No, far from it, but as a way of keeping on top of a diverse range of subjects without breaking a sweat, RSS-enabled applications, like Google Reader, are so much easier and efficient than email has ever been or will ever be.
So, during August, while the Property Pulse Newsletter takes a break, why not set up Google reader to update you on the latest Spanish property news when it suits you - rather than when it suits me to email it to you.
I hope you have a great summer - I'm certainly planning on doing so myself :)
Martin Dell, Kyero.com
