Deals, Discounts, Bargains for Lazy People

Intro: Cut down on the time and effort to track websites that post deals, coupons, etc. Rather than visiting a dozen deals sites, (such as SlickDeals, Dealmac, Techbargains, Fatwallet, Deals2Buy), you could monitor all deals posted to these sites from one place.

Note: If you are new to using an RSS reader, please read on. There are other portal type sites and RSS readers, (aka aggregators), available but I will focus on tools from Google because it is what I decided on. The principles here apply to anything you want to monitor, like ebay, news, etc. I also watch technical blogs the same way.

1. Set up a Google account and go to Google Reader, if you do not already have an account. I use Google Reader through iGoogle, which allows a consolidated dashboard for the World Wide Web, (WWW).

2. Go to a website you want to watch and look for "RSS Feed", "RDF" or something similar. On Dealmac.com, it's difficult to find and I had to use the web browser find function to locate the link. This leads to an excellent list of RSS feeds for Dealmac at http://dealmac.com/rss.html. If you look at that page, you will see that you get a lot of choices.

3. Click on a feed. In Firefox, you should see a window that allows you to choose the RSS reader to use. If I wasn't lazy, I'd show you an IE example too, but if that's important to you you could add that information in a comment or let me know and I will add it.



4. Add the RSS feed to Google Reader (Firefox users, choose Google in the step above). You are essentially subscribing to the feed. After you have added some sites, you can manage the subscription, which allows you to organize the feeds under categories and rename them. Mine looks something like this:

5. While this saves you enough time already, you can then add Google Reader to your iGoogle page. You can do this through the Add Stuff... link on your iGoogle page. Mine looks like this. Note, I have also selected a theme, so don't panic if yours looks different. One important thing below is that I can change the category of the RSS feeds I want to watch.

Note: The RSS feeds on many sites, (i.e. craigslist.org), are delayed from the normal posts.

Also, the best part is that you can look at many of the feed items without going to the websites!!


Summary: You can see bits of websites without visiting them. I can't browse all of the websites I am interested in on a regular basis so I subscribe to the RSS feeds and only follow through to the feed items I really want to see in more detail. This is great for watching for deals.

References:
RSS (Wikipedia)
RSS Reader (Wikipedia)
Official Google Reader Blog

Wisdom: Your budget should outweigh the savings or benefit. Don't get buried to your neck in debt for a good deal.