Quick RSS

Author: Dedi Hubbard
Published: February 23, 2005

What is RSS?

The acronym can stand for a couple of different things, but suffice it to say that it's a new way of moving around web content that many people love and just as many people, if not more, just don't get. At it's core RSS is really simple, it's just the headline, content and meta information about a particular new item from a blog, news site or whatever, wrapped up in an XML file. While this RSS file on its own isn't very exciting, when combined with an aggregator program these feeds can be used to inform you of when your favorite sites have been updated and in some cases give you a summary (or the full article) without visiting the site.

 Sample RSS reader 

Here's an example of how i use RSS on most days. I open up Firefox web browser in which I've installed Sage, an extention that adds RSS aggregation to the Firefox sidebar, and I hit the "Check Feeds" button. Sage moves through the links to almost 100 different RSS feeds from a folder I've preset in my Bookmarks and checks each one for updated and new content. Once Sage has done it's thing, the sites with new content should all be highlighted and each new article will appear in bold. I can now go through and browse directly to all the newest stuff from all my favorite websites.

There's a few flavors of RSS, different versions including 0.9, 1.0 and 2.0 as well as a newer format called Atom. For most of us, these can be considered equivalent formats so you can choose any of them and get the expected results.

How To

Steps:

  • Download and Install Firefox.

  • Install Sage

  • Visit a site you'd like to add, click "Discover Feeds" (the magnifying glass icon). Select the feeds you want and click the "add" button. click "done" when you're finished.

  • To view new content, click "Check Feeds" (the circular arrow icon). once things have settled, choose newly updated sites by clicking bookmarks with the red asterisks. this loads the articles from the site in the bottom part of Sage. click on the bold headlines to view new articles.

Feeds are everywhere

I'd recommend trying out feeds at http://del.icio.us/ and http://flickr.com/. If you love cats you can "subscribe" to http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/cats and that feed will give you access to all the bookmarks del.icio.us users have entered about cats.

Same with Flickr; try http://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=cats&format=rss2 and you'll get linked into all the photos Flickr users have taken of their cats. It's not just about cats though, there are many news sources, like the NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/rss) , using feeds to keep their readers up-to-date.

How do you know if a site has a feed? Well, Sage has built-in feed discovery, but most sites have a link somewhere (usually on the side or at the bottom) and some even sport an orange XML button. Happy Feed Hunting!

GeekSpeak and RSS

Don't forget to add GeekSpeak to your feeds: http://geekspeak.org/shows/rss.xml.

Our Feburary 25th, 2005 show highlights this article and covers more about RSS.