RSS Feeds; saving time and staying up to date

Monday, February 8th, 2010

RSS is part of the whole web 2.0 thing.  It allows you to subscribe to a website, like this one, and receive notification of new content.  Huzzah, you can finally stop checking my blog every day for new content knowing that I only update once a week at best.  Or, checking it about twice a year and finding you have missed too many posts to be bothered with.

For those that don’t know, web 2.0 is basically websites and web applications based around the user, allowing for interaction.  You can think of social networking sites like Facebook, video sharing sites like Youtube, or even this blog.  That’s right, MikeLenzen.com is part of the whole web 2.0 craze.  This is because it allows comments from users, like you, and track-backs to other blogs which link to posts here.  Give it a try, post a comment when you are done reading this post.

Now back to RSS.  There are two different ways in which I use it, and right or wrong I’m going to share them with you.

First, you need to know how to find out if a website supports RSS (note there are other formats which act about the same as RSS.  These are RDS and ATOM).  See the image at the very top of this post?  It’s orange with some white quarter circles and a dot.  If you see that image in the right of your address bar (the area of your web browser that shows what web address you are visiting), it’s supported.  You should see that logo in the described location right now as this site does support RSS.

Okay, so what can you do with it?  The first way I use RSS is for frequently updating sites that have dozens of new articles each day.  Think news sites.  RSS works great here, because it allows you to quickly scan the titles of all the day’s news articles and read only the ones that interest you.  For this I use the built in “Live Bookmarks” in Firefox.  Don’t have Firefox?  click here then comeback and read the rest of this article using your new Firefox browser.

Okay, you’ve got Firefox, so here’s how this “Live Bookmarks” thing works.  With any luck your version of Firefox came with a button directly bellow the Address Bar that says Latest Headlines.  This is actually the “Live Bookmarks” feed showing the latest news from news.bbc.co.uk.  Because this is supposed to be somewhat of a tutorial I’m going to show you how to set it up, even though you probably already have it.  Note this method will apply to any site that supports RSS, not just the BBC.

In a new tab brows to http://news.bbc.co.uk.  Then simply click the orange logo I described earlier in the address bar.  A new page should load with all the newest articles.  This is the RSS feed.  Firefox will be asking you at the very top of this if you would like to subscribe to the feed.  Make sure “Live Bookmarks” is selected and click the Subscribe Now button.  Enter the title you want your feed to be called and select Subscribe.  You should now see your brand new RSS feed embedded into Firefox.  Assuming you used the default title, it should look something like this when you click on it.

There we have it.  Just click on any article titles that tickle your fancy, and it loads in the browser.  The feed updates every time you open your browser, so your list of newest articles is always up to date.

Okay, on to method two.  I use this method when I want to share articles with friends, or simply keep up to date on websites and blogs that do not update all that often, say like MikeLenzen.com.  There are programs out there that can be loaded up with as many feeds as you’d like, and they will pool them all in once place allowing you to see what you’ve read and what you haven’t.  Most of them also let you read the articles, or at least a summary, right there so you can get caught up with all your reading in one place.  I use a web application called Google Reader to do this.  There are many reasons I settled on Google Reader, for example:

1. I haven’t tried very many of the applications available.  This was good enough
2. I don’t need an offline viewer or dedicated program as I’m always online, but not always at the same computer
3. It works well
4. It allows sharing so I get to read interesting articles my friends find, which i would otherwise miss
5. It’s web based so I can use it in Linux, Windows, Mac or anything else with a web browser
6. It’s free

The first thing you need to do is to setup your own google reader account.  Click on this link to get started.  If you are already a user of any google apps, like gmail, you just enter your login name and password.  If your not, you’ll have to create an account.  Alright, we’ve got that done.  now click on the orange RSS logo on this website just like we did for the BBC website before.

Whoa, what’s this?  There is more than one feed!  On this site there are.  You can select the main feed which will show you all new posts I make, or one of the comment feeds which will either show you all new user comments for the entire blog, or just the comments for only the article you have selected.

Lets select the main feed.  This time when Firefox asks us what we would like to use to subscribe to the feed, choose “Google” instead of “Live Bookmarks” then click Subscribe Now.  In the next page, select Add to Google Reader.  This will show you a preview of what the feed will look like.  Simply hit Subscribe one more time and you are done.  Now, you can log into Google Reader at any time and get updates from all the websites and blogs you want to follow.  Google Reader will automatically check all your feeds and display only the new articles.  This way, you can be sure you are updated with new articles from you favorite sites without having to continuously browse to each site in hopes of new material.

Tags: tips, web
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