RSS basics

You might know this by now. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The idea is that you subscribe to certain source of content, and automatically delivers to you any update. It sounds simple but took me several months from when I first heard about it till I managed to get all the components, configure it and successfully use it. Then what happened is that everyday I would get hundreds of headers, because I subscribed to far too many sources of info, making it useless because I could never read everything.

So how does it work? You need first of all a RSS reader. I use http://www.bloglines.com/. When you first open it you don’t get what it is or how it works. But the only thing that you need to do is to install the applications that enable you to subscribe, and the notification application, The subscriber works integrated in your explorer. So what you would do is when you are in a website that like your friend’s announces at the bottom that offers RSS, you could then click in that icon and then a new page with only text will open. You would then right click your mouse and in the menu will show that you can subscribe to that feed. Then the Bloglines browser will open and it will ask you under what category you want to save it. So in practice you can have your feeds organized by topics, sources etc. Many websites offer RSS some of them they have already the subscription link integrated, a bit like MyYahoo subscribe link. This links do all the work, so if you find a bloglines link by clicking you avoid the right click I mentioned before.

The alert notification application is just an icon on your desktopbar part of the start up menu. So you might not like it when you subscribe to many feeds because it will slow your computer. The way it works is that everytime ie BBC launches a new you would get an alert, then you would clik on the icon and would open the bloglines browser.

As a summary I think is a brillian idea and now most of the big newspapers, use RSS. In my opinion the real value of this is when you can subscribe per topic to sources where experts in certain areas post continuously news or articles. There is a site called del.icio.us That is a place where people share links. So if I find something really cool about internet Tv and I want to share it I would post it there, or I wrote something about it on my blog, I would send the link there. Because you can ad tags that define the topics, people interested about certain subjects can subscribe via bloglines to the topic, and then get anything that anyone talks or writes about the topic. So there you have it the perfect assistant to get always the latest info on the cutting edge subjects. Again it sounds better that the reality since the other side of the coin is the overflow of information.

Conclusion I switched off my bloglines before the summer and I have not switched it on ever since. Though I am tempted to turn it on every now and then.