Introduction to RSS - Really Simple Syndication
Learning to Read the Web Faster with News Feeds
RSS is a technology that has been around since the mid-90s and the technology exists in all popular web browsers that can run on a Mac, PC, or Linux.
RSS stands for "really simple syndication" and is a way for a website to publish its content as a newsfeed. While it is relatively unknown outside of the tech community, RSS can easily shorten the amount of time it takes to read through many websites. RSS achieves this by stripping out all of the nonessential information website posts leaving only the news updates available in a text only format.
Getting Started in Firefox
For this article, the focus will be on web browsers that are cross platform (meaning they run on multiple operating systems) which allows for consistency across the board. When using a web browser such as Firefox, RSS is very easy to set up.
When a website is visited that offers an RSS feed a small, blue icon appears on the right side of the address bar. Clicking this allows the viewer to see just the news items of that website. This is a great way to read the site but an even better method is to subscribe to the RSS feed itself.
This is the same as subscribing to a newspaper that comes every day, but the RSS feed updates as the website is updated. This allows the reader to read the website without even visiting because the feed updates itself. In the case of Firefox, they call it live bookmarks.
Using Google to Get the News Everywhere
The live bookmarks feature in Firefox works great but those RSS feeds are only saved on the local machine. To have the most updated news on the go, Google's Reader Web application is the perfect answer.
Google solves the problem of moving around by saving all of the RSS subscriptions on their side allowing access from anywhere. The feeds are always in sync regardless of if the feed is checked from work, home or anywhere else. Google also has some advanced features such as "starring" a news item to save it for later and it also allows the importing of RSS feeds from other applications. Best of all, Google reader is free.
Dedicated RSS Applications
Due to the popularity of RSS there are many desktop applications that will read, synchronize, and perform a multitude of tasks to make reading RSS feeds even easier. Just like Firefox, all of these settings and even the application itself run on the local computer but their advanced feature set can offset that negative item.
For the Mac, one of the top applications to use is called NewNewsWire and it is free. For the PC users out there one of the top-rated programs is called FeedDemon. These two are a great place to start a quick Google search will yield many, many results allowing anyone to dive headfirst into the world of RSS.
An RSS Icon
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Technology
Latest Articles