Why you should give RSS a try

I wish more of my friends took advantage of RSS feeds, because they have made my internet experience much easier. I will share my experience with you now, and maybe you will have a better internet experience too.

Let's say you have a friend who writes a blog that you enjoy reading. Your friend writes pretty regularly, but it's not like he updates his blog every day. You don't want to go to his webpage every single day to see if he's got a new posting, but if you don't go pretty regularly then you will miss a lot of it. RSS fixes all of that.

RSS stands for 'Really Simple Syndication.' It sends things from the internet to things called 'aggregators.' An aggregator is a program that collects the different feeds you subscribe to all in one place. So, I can get the blog posts from your friends blog sent to your aggreator, and every time your friend posts, you know about it right away.

You can subscribe to any number of different things. Lots of websites allow you to subscribe to their material in RSS form. The symbol for RSS looks like this:

Any URL in your browser that has that symbol next to it can be subscribed to as an RSS. Here's an example:

The result is similar to having your own newspaper delivered to you every day through the internet. You can get news feeds from any number of news sites like CNN. I like to get TV news through a site called BuddyTV and movies through Rotten Tomatoes. I also subscribe to comics, both webcomics and comics that appear in newspapers. Also, Facebook lets you subscribe to lots of things. I subscribe to all of my friends' notes so every time someone on my friend list puts a note up, it shows up on my RSS reader. Almost every blog has an option to subscribe, so if you check your RSS aggregator every day, the content will be different each time you check. I don't go to that many websites anymore, because the content that I want is automatically delivered to me every day. You can browse through the articles in chronological order, or you can filter them by feed or by category. I like to browse through them in the order they were published because it gives me a variety of news and comics and blogs to read, and I don't always know what will come next.

Anyway, there are several different RSS aggregators, but my favorite is called Google Reader. You can find it at google.com/reader. It's easy to add new feeds and it's easy to navigate. Here is a screenshot of what my Google Reader page looks like, looking at today's Get Fuzzy.


The disadvantage of Google Reader is that it's web based. You have to go to that website in order to use it. For Mac users, Apple Mail will get RSS feeds, but I don't really like how it works that much. I recently discovered a program called Vienna that collects RSS like a mail program does, but does it in a better way. I like it because I don't have to go on a web browser to get my feeds, and it will run in the background. When a new article appears, it shows up in the bottom of my screen like a new email would. Here's the same Get Fuzzy comic as it appears in Vienna.

Well, that's it. I hope this inspires you to go out and research RSS feeds and use them for yourself. It helps me to get to stuff I care about so I have more time to do other things rather than surf around sporadically on the web. Maybe you will subscribe to my blog first!