Really Simple What?

What is RSS? I've tried blogging about the benefits of RSS or its propper name, Really Simple Syndication for quite a few times but it always end up being too technical and would most probably confuse or bore you.. or perhaps both, well before you figure out what it's for. So, being true to my last posting, here's a simpler way to explain: picture.


Now, what the hell is that? That my fair lady is an RSS reader application for Mac OS X. Fret not, Windows have their own incarnation too and in fact you might be using one now. If you are using Firefox or Internet Explorer 7, your browser is capable of handling RSS feed so you don't really need the use of an external reader.

Now based on my experience, most RSS reader sports an interface that resembles one another so what you see in my RSS reader, the layout and all that would almost be what you see on Windows. Now, on the left hand side is a list of all website and blogs I subscribed with. How do one subscribe to a website? See that orange logo near the bottom of this blog's sidebar? That's an RSS logo. Most sites would have it quite where i have mine or in some cases at the bottom most of the page. If not, look for something with RSS written over it. On top of that, most modern browser will display the logo on the address bar of the site, next to the its address so you don't need to go hunting around the page to subscribe. Just click on the damn orange logo. Almost certainly, that's basically what one ought to do to subscribe. They don't call it Really Simple Syndication for nothing did they?

So there for example I subscribed to Wired Magazine's online site and when I click on it, the top-right pane will display the headlines of all entries that are available on the site chronologically. All I need to do now is select which headline that I find interesting and click on it. An excerpt of the article would then appear on the bottom-right pane for me to read a lil bit more on the story and if I really want to know more, I can just double click on the headline again and the website of the said article will open and I can read all about it.

Now, you might wonder why go through all this if you can just open a browser and key in the sites you frequent most. Well, that works too but if you are like me and your frequent read consists of 20 something sites.. it might be a hassle. With RSS, I can just skim through all the headlines of all 20 sites in one place and only select those which interest me the most. Another cool thing is most RSS readers can be set to automatically refresh the content of all subscriptions so what you get is up to date news.

Simple isn't it? Now you don't really need to check a particular blog to know of any updates, your RSS reader will do it for you. For Mac users, Safari is a very good RSS reader but you might want to try other variations like NetNewsWire, NewsFire or my personal favorite, Vienna. Windows user might want to have a look at Feedreader, FeedDemon or good ol' Mozilla Thunderbird. I don't know about you, but once I tried RSS, I got hooked and never looked back.

Happy experimenting!

Labels: internet