How To Create A RSS Feed Bundle On Google Reader

Since I did my article on how Google Reader is advancing into a social network in its own right, I have been looking around to see what other interesting and useful features Reader has.  One of them is the ability to make a RSS feed bundle for others to subscribe to.

Like me, I’m sure you have a certain list of RSS feeds that you are absolutely loyal to and which you read every day. Perhaps you would like to put those RSS feeds into a clickable package so others can subscribe to them all with the click of a mouse? That’s where the feed bundle comes in.

Setting it up is a cinch so let’s take a look at how to do it.

First go to Google Reader and log in. Then go to this page and you will see this :

Your RSS feeds are in a list on the left hand side and the box above is on the right hand side. So as the picture says, just click, drag and drop the feed(s) from the left hand side to this box on the right.  Don’t worry, the actual feed will stay as it is so don’t worry about deleting a feed that still has 100 unread items on it or anything!

As the screenshot also shows, if you drag across a feed and you have second thoughts, just drag it into the bottom box and it will be taken away.

I have personally limited my bundle to 10 feeds (a nice round number) which was pretty difficult as there are quite a few more that I read every day. But for the purposes of this article, I limited it to 10 to make it easy.

So after I have finished dragging the feeds over, it should look like this :

The next step is to save it all and you will then be presented with this :

For the OPML file, just right-click on the link and save to your computer. The OPML file can be used by others to directly load the feeds into the RSS reader of their choice.

The “add a link to your website or blog” will set up another version of your Reader shared items page but only with those feeds on them (here’s mine). You can then link to that page however you wish.

The email option is pretty straight forward. The “create a bundle clip” will produce something like this :

With something like this, you can put it in your blog sidebar and people can instantly subscribe to all your favourite feeds simply by clicking the “subscribe” button at the bottom. The colors can be customized a little (but only 8 options and not very inspiring ones at that. It would be nice if Google provided a color table so you can mix your own tones).

As well as regular guys like you and me promoting our favourite feeds, a good use of this would be if a website had various sections all with their own individual RSS feeds. They could bundle all the feeds together into a package and people could then subscribe to everything with the click of a button.

What other uses do you think this could be used for? What RSS bundles have you made?