Fun with RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. This is a file format that uses XML that allow websites to publish information and for other websites or software applications to read it. RSS is a standard but has come to signify a number of other formats such as the Atom file format. RSS is usually referred to as a feed or web feed and is normally indicated by this icon:

RSS Basics

When browsing the internet the icon above will sometimes appear on your browser somewhere.

It appears next to the home button on Internet Explorer 7:

It appears in the address bar at the top of the browser in Firefox:

This means that the browser has found a feed on the site you are visiting and if you want you can subscribe to the feed and read any new content published in the feed.

In Internet Explorer 7 to subscribe to a feed:

1) Click on the orange icon. This should show you a list of available feeds.
2) From the list click on the feed you would like to subscribe to. This will show you a display of what the feed contains.
3) At the top of this page there should be a yellow box. In the yellow box there should be a ‘Subscribe to this feed’ link. If you click this it will add the feed to your favourite feeds. You can set up folders to organise you feeds much as you would when organising your bookmarks.

Once subscribed you can access your feeds by clicking on the ‘bookmarks star’ at the top right of the browser. If you view you list of feeds and you notice one that is bold this means that the feed has new content that you have not looked at yet.

To subscribe to a feed in Firefox when you see the orange icon in the address bar if you click on it, it will show you a short dropdown menu. This will display your subscription options. You can add the feed as a ‘live bookmark’ this is pretty much like a normal bookmark but when you click on it, it will display a list of the latest content published in the feed. With Firefox you can also use an extension to view the feed or use another application to read the feed.

Other Applications

Sage
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/77

Sage is a Firefox extension. Once you have installed Sage you access it from the tools menu. It splits the viewing panel into 3 areas. Top left is you list of feeds, underneath this appears a list content from your currently selected feed. In the main panel on the left the content from your currently selected feed is displayed along with an intro for each article.

RSSOwl
http://www.rssowl.org/

RSSOwl is a standalone feed reader application. This is a cross platform application and works on Windows, Macs and Linux. It has a three panel layout with the panel on the left displaying all your subscribed feeds. The top right hand panel displaying the content from your currently selected feed and the bottom panel display in the intro text from the article. You can also assign which browser you want any links you click on to open in. RSS has a good feature that allows you to enter a website address and automatically find any feeds on the site. This is good if you want keep up-to-date with a site and are not sure if it has any feeds.

Google Reader
http://www.google.com/reader

Google Reader is an online feed reader. If you have a Google account it is one of the features you can make of. Being an online feed reader Google have incorporated some social networking features. For instance you can share articles with friends via a web page or another RSS feed. You can also ‘Star’ articles to permanently keep a particular article. You can also tag articles.

Google Reader provides stats on what you have been reading or subscribing to. This allows you monitor your reading habits and if you are subscribed to a lot of feeds perhaps trim some of the ones that you aren’t reading so much. The reader also suggests sites you might like to subscribe to based on you current subscriptions.

What now?

Many sites have feeds and subscribing to them can make the business of keeping up to date with what’s going on in the world or in your areas of interest easier. Instead of randomly ‘googling’ for articles or information, if you find sites that have feeds you can subscribe to them and follow what is going on and access all these sources in one place.

Many news sites now have feeds including the BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times and many others which you can add to your reader. If you have a particular favourite there is a good chance it has a feed.

Social networking and RSS

Many social networking site use feeds to enable you to share information with other sites. There has been a new phenomenon called ‘lifestreaming’ where you gather together all you feeds that you create on sites like Delicious, Facebook, Twitter or Flickr and create a new feed that displays all your activity on these sites. This allows you to follow the activity of friends and colleagues by following one feed rather than subscribing to all one that appear on. Here are some links to some lifestreaming sites;

• Lifestream.fm - http://lifestream.fm
• Secondbrain - http://secondbrain.com/

Some social networks allow posting via mobile phone with that and GPS on mobile phones and with services like Fire Eagle it is possible for people to let their social networks know where they are in the world and what they are doing all the time.