A quick lesson in RSS

Meesh was asking me about RSS today and I figured I would write up a quick synopsis of what it is and how to use it.

First off, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a standard way of formatting text so that a computer can read an RSS feed (which is just a URL that points to a text file) which is filled with posts to a web site. It's designed for use by web sites that have the format of a news site; small, digestible chunks of information that have a title and a body of text.

To read RSS you need an RSS reader. If you are using Firefox or IE 7, you're set. If not, you can pick between a bunch of them no matter what OS you are on. There are also web-based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines.

With an RSS reader you now get an automated way to gather up all of the new posts made to the various web sites you visit. The reader goes out, gets the RSS feed, looks at it, and then gives you a list of the titles of the posts on that site. If you go with a slightly fancy reader (i.e., any reader that is not part of a browser), it will also remember what posts you looked at in the RSS reader. This means that it will not bother you with stuff you have already read.

This all adds up to a boon in terms of browsing the web. You can have RSS feeds for a ton of sites and read only what is new. This is great for sites that are not updated frequently since you don't have to bother going to the site to see if there is something new; let the RSS reader do the work. And for the sites that you do visit regularly and updated frequently, you can now read the titles of the new posts quickly and easily in one place and skip the ones you do care about more easily.

So, how do you tell if a site you visit has an RSS feed? Well, if you are using Firefox or IE 7 there will be an orange symbol that looks like soundwaves are going out of it. You can click that to subscribe to an RSS feed. Web sites will also list they have a "Subscribe", "RSS", or "Atom" link. Those are almost always links to the RSS feed.

I strongly recommend any regular web surfers out there to use it in your daily browsing. It will allow you to browse more in the same amount of time. Even if you use it only for some of the sites you visit (might have a few sites you just like visiting on a regular basis, for instance) it still is worth the effort in using.

And it isn't hard to get going with it either. Just do your usual browsing, and if you notice it has an RSS feed, add it your RSS reader. And you just continually do this adding of feeds to your reader. So that you start your browsing with your RSS reader, and then move on to web sites you don't have a feed for after.