RSS – An Intro and a Suggestion – Part 1
June 3rd, 2009Visited 282 times, 1 so far today
The problem RSS tries to solve.
In the real world beyond my 13.3 inch portal, the New York Times arrives once a day. Sad face. And where a reader ignores anything more than the comics, the rest of the paper is waste. For the reader, yesterday’s news involves an active search on your part, finding an old paper then sifting through junk until you get to your…well, comics.
These days people have jumped from the TV and paper to the Internet. What if you get your news from CNN.com? You would have to actively visit the site to hear whether anything had changed in the world around you. It’s a nuisance.
Application.
Let’s say I love blog X for its witty banter and mind blowing commentary, lets call it Heavytext, but the posts are super irregular. (It’s not an every day at 2pm sort of thing here at headquarters) What’s the best way to find out if there’s been a recent post? Well, rather than actively checking the page every twenty minutes, you could subscribe to the news feed…or it’s RSS feed. Synonymous.
RSS for the most part stands for ‘Real Simple Syndication.’ It’s a universal standard for subscription to the net’s content. Subscribing to a web site’s RSS feed is akin to subscribing to a physical magazine, in that you receive, at a certain interval, a copy of the news. But instead of arriving in your physical mailbox, your news arrives in ‘an aggregator’, like your email. Your email client is, in a sense, an aggregator in that when you log into gmail it ‘aggregates’ or ‘collects’ your emails.
If you look to the right of my page you’ll see a tastelessly large orange square with a couple white wavy lines. That is the universally accepted symbol for RSS, and yes, it is generally orange, though sometimes blue, and on the first page of most websites. Clicking on this box will add the site to your aggregator of choice. Many browsers have this built in. Those wavy lines can also be found in the address bar sometimes too. You could click them there as well.
After having plugged into said RSS ‘collector’ all the sites you would like to follow, it will reach out across the internet and notify you of all those sites that were updated. Whether there was a lone update a month ago or a dozen over the past two days. Were you to follow a certain podcast, an audio broadcast, or an Mp3 blog your RSS aggregator would actually download the files for you, and in many cases upload them straight to iTunes.
Suggestion.
It would be tasteless to not make a recommendation at this point. After a year or so digging through the trough of available RSS readers, free or not, Netnewswire stands alone as a premier RSS Client for the Mac. Shawn Blanc does a phenomenally in-depth review, which just might be more convincing than my preaching. I even paid for it before they released it for free to the public! I’m just going to plug the Newsgator Iphone app real quick and not push it any further.
Now that you’re a news guru, Mashable can give you a severe jump in savviness without the logged Google hours.
Swish! Off of assignment.
