What does the ipadio follow button do?

Did you know that it’s possible to subscribe to a channel on ipadio, so that you’ll be automatically notified after every new phonecast? For example, I really like Ewan’s phonecasts, and I want to be told about it whenever something new happens on his channel. But how can I do this? Why not give that big “Follow” button a click and find out?

When you first click the follow button, you’ll see a screen that looks a bit like this:

There’s three ways of staying up-to-date with channels through the follow button:

1) Via your ipadio account

If you’re already an ipadio user and have your own account, you can follow other channels through your profile – just check the ‘Phlogs I’m following’ tab when you’ve logged in!

2) Via E-Mail

In these days of social media, social bookmarking and social everything, it’s easy to forget about trusty old e-mails – which are probably the one thing you keep open all of the time on your computer. Simply enter your name and e-mail address (and again, to confirm that it’s correct), and you’ll get an e-mail every time there’s a phonecast on the channel, complete with a link to listen.

3) Via RSS

This is the one I think is most interesting – because of how flexible RSS feeds are. What’s cool is that using this feed you can turn the channel into a podcast and listen to it in iTunes and similar software – or you can set up a Live Bookmark in most modern web browsers. Here’s how:

Live Bookmark

You should see a little orange icon with white lines radiating from a circle – “” – this is the all important feed button. Give this a click.

What happens next depends on your browser and settings, but chances are that if you’re using a sufficiently modern browser you’ll be taken to the RSS feed as loaded by your browser. Something like this (I use Mozilla Firefox):

You’ll see there’s a dropdown menu at the top for me to select what to do with the RSS feed – and one of the options is as a live bookmark. By adding this live bookmark to my bookmarks, it creates a folder which will always list my latest phonecasts. Like so:

Podcast

If you’d prefer to listen to the phonecasts as a podcast – this is easy too. Simply copy and paste the URL (website address) of this RSS feed into your podcast client – such as iTunes. If you are using iTunes, its easy to just to to “Advanced” on the menu at the top and choose “subscribe to podcast” and put the URL in there:

The nice thing about it being a podcast is that every time I syncronise my iPod, it will be loaded up with the latest phonecasts!

Have you got any other fun ways of tuning into ipadio phonecasts? Or maybe you’d like some help with what I’ve talked about above – why not leave a comment?

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