An Avalanche Of Content - RSS To The Rescue
July 17th, 2007 by Stephen Cronin (1,736 views)Content, content, content! There is so much content flowing around the Internet, that it’s impossible to keep up with it all. I want to read the latest news, sports, blogs, development info, etc, but I have no time to visit hundreds of sites. How do I manage? The answer: RSS.
Now, many of you are saying “RSS isn’t new, we’ve had it for ages”. That’s what I thought too. But I recently read Vegan Momma’s How Do You Visit Your Virtual Neighbors and it seems that there are people who aren’t using RSS yet. If you’re one of those people, then its time to give it a try.
The beauty in RSS is that the content comes to you, instead of you having to go to the website to get it. Think of it like email. When there is new content, a message is sent to you, containing a couple of sentences about the article’s topic and a link to the article. If you are interested, then you go to the website, to read the full story or leave comments.
Where do you get the RSS feeds? Most modern websites, whether they are news sites or blogs, have one or more RSS feeds for their content. Simply look for the 
icon or RSS link, right click on it, choose properties and copy the URL. You need to subscribe to this URL into your reader.
What is a reader? It is the program you use to subscribe to feeds and read their entries. There are many readers around, including Google Reader, which seems very popular. Personally, I recommend using a free offline reader such as SharpReader or Mozilla Thunderbird. Both of these work like email programs, in that entries come to an inbox where you can browse them, delete them etc. Often, online readers just show you the current entries - you can’t see old ones, you can’t delete them.
I would be lost without RSS. It is the only way I can hope to manage the huge amount of content that I read. If you haven’t tried it, give it a go. If you have, feel free to back me up, or shoot me down if you disagree.
Tags: feed readers, feeds, google
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Stephen:
Great information. I use RSS feed on BlogLines.com everyday. I subscribe those blogs that I think are very informative. However, I have subscribe too many blogs already. Some of them are just copied from each other.
I don’t read all of them. I briefly glance over the post or use the “Only my feed” search function to find interesting topic I like to read. It saves me a lot of time.
I find BlogLines.com is very useful.
PS. What ICT stands for? You said you are teaching ICT in China in your about page.
Terence,
Thanks. Personally I don’t subscribe to many individual blogs - I’m more likely to subscribe to a community feed (such as Bumpzee) or a Google Blog Search feed on a topic I like. Still get the duplicates though!
I’m trying BlogLines.com now, for an upcoming post on online vs offline readers - each have their advantages and online readers seem much better than when I last tried them, but I’m still using an offline reader for most feeds.
ICT = Information and Communication Technology. Basically computers… I am teaching students in a program that gets them entry into Australian university. Enjoying it a lot!
Wow.. ICT sounds a really interesting stuff. I hope to visit Australian one day.
You made a good point. I forgot that I can subscribe Google blog search.
I used Thunderbird for my offline RSS subscription. It sucks. What do you use for your offline reader? I heard that RSSBandit is a good one, but have never tried it.
Terence,
I hope you make it to Australia one day - it’s a nice place!
I used SharpReader for a long time - it simple, but does the job well, at least for me. Incidently, it marks duplicate entries so you know they appear in another feed (if they have the same URL, not if it’s the same content on different sites). Doesn’t delete them for you though.
I recently switched to the Portable Apps version of Thundbird, so I can take it on my USB drive. I agree Thunderbird sucks, but I’m going to stick with it for a while - I’m currently writing an Thunderbird extension to make it do something I want! (which is why I’m slow at responding).
I had a look at RSS Bandit a long time ago and didn’t switch from SharpReader, but I don’t know what the current version is like.
I found this article very interesting and informative. I hear people throw terms around but hate to explain what they mean thank you for sheding some light on the subject.