An RSS overview for those confused
Having gone to the trouble to provide RSS feeds to various areas on my site (see the syndication link in the navigation menu), I wanted to give some help to those interested but confused as to what this technology is and what it does.
RSS stands for really simple syndication. Among other things, it’s a technology that allows you to get a list and summary of the content available from a website. What’s the big deal you ask? I can go out to that website and see the content myself! You’re right — you can. But what if you had 30 websites that you wanted to keep an eye on. Some you really liked, some you kind of liked, others just occasionally had things that interested you. And what if many of those website infrequently add new content? You’d be wasting an awful lot of time going to each individual site.
Enter RSS. With RSS, you can grab a list of all the content available at these sites. By looking over the titles and a short summary, you can decide if you want to view that article or not. It’ll even tell you if the site has new content since the last time you checked. And best of all, you can check your feeds from one place, when you want to. In the nascent days of the internet, everyone offered newsletters. “Sign up for my newsletter and I’ll send you 213 updates a week!” Multiply that by 30 sites and, well, you get the picture. With RSS, you check at your convenience. If you’re busy for a week, don’t bother and when you have time, see what you missed.
On my site, I wanted to offer RSS feeds not only to the whole site (every post I make), but also to each individual category. This way, people interested in some of what I’m saying, but not all of it, can keep an eye on the categories that interest them. I also have a category named The Digest where I post high quality, “here’s what’s going on in my (and Amy’s) life.” This should allow family and friends to keep up to date, without having to read every post.
Now that I’ve won you over and you’re dying to try this great tool called RSS, where do you turn? Well, there are many different ways to view RSS feeds. No one company owns the technology, so lots of people have written viewers.
I personally use Sage, which is a plugin inside the popular web browser FireFox. If you like technology, and are comfortable tinkering with it, then these two links are for you! Firefox is wonderful (much better than Internet Explorer), but personally I like to customize it and if that sounds scary to you, then there are other RSS alternatives. Just a note, I’ve never used any of these other programs, so I don’t truely know how well or how easy they are. I’ve tried to point you in the direction of those that seem to be the most popular. It would also be good to mention that the next version of Internet Explorer will support RSS feeds within the browser. Microsoft’s a little behind the curve as they’ve often been with web technologies.
One service that I’ve heard good things about is BlogLines. This is a web-based RSS reader. Meaning that you point it in the direction of the RSS feeds you want to watch, and then you come out to their website where you can view all your feeds. Perhaps the coolest thing about this service is that you can check your feeds from anywhere with a internet connection. Other RSS readers are programs on your computer, so if you’re at somebody elses computer, you can’t check your RSS feeds. With BlogLines you can.
Many RSS programs exist for Microsoft Windows. Here’s some links to a few. Sharp Reader, Feed Reader, and News Gator (works within Microsoft Outlook). There’s a bunch more. If you’re the curious type, Google ‘RSS readers’ and have fun wading through the plethora that exist.
And if there are any of you using a Mac, Net News Wire might be the RSS reader for you.
One final note… Like so many other technologies, RSS comes in different versions. I offer different versions of my feeds to reach as many people as possible. But since that’s probably confusing for you, just use RSS 2.0 or Atom 0.3. They should work with any newer RSS reader.