What is RSS and why should I care?
With the world wide web quickly expanding, information is everywhere. From stock tips to sports scores, one can find anything he or she wants simply by doing a quick Google search. I personally know a lot of people who have a routine of going to MSN, CNN, or Fox News every morning to check the daily headlines. They then proceed to a few more sites to get their daily dose of what’s going on in the world.
Wouldn’t it be great though if you could save yourself a lot of time, gather only the information you want, and have that content come straight to you? After all let’s face it, who wants to scan headlines just to hear about Britney Spear’s newest haircut or Tiger Wood’s newest mistress. Instead of wasting your time on the stuff you don’t want to see, have the stuff you do want to see come right to you. Welcome to RSS!
Google defines RSS as a quick way to bring regularly updated content to you, but it is more fine tuned than that. For example, say that you like the finance section of USA Today a lot but you don’t really care for their front page, or much of their other content. RSS allows you to subscribe just to that section.
You might be saying to yourself ‘I’m not that interested in news’. Well HOLD UP! RSS isn’t limited to simple news stories. Any kind of information that gets regularly updated can be fair game. Sports scores, the newest sale at your favorite department store, stock quotes, and much more. There is a world of opportunity that is awaiting. Instead of going to each site manually every day and spending tons of time, take advantage of the world of RSS and grab more information quicker.
How Do I Get Started?
In order to hit the ground running there are a few things that you need to do to get started.
- 1) Sign up for an RSS syncing service. It’s easy to use RSS by itself, but why have all that information if you can’t sync, store, and share it? For this step I highly recommend
Google Reader. - 2) Choose how you want to access your content: There are many ways across all your systems and devices.
- You can directly access your subscriptions by going to your reader account at google.com/reader.
- You can have a program on your computer that accesses your account for you and then shows you.
There are many desktop programs out there that organize, or better said, aggregate your news content for you. There are even programs that aggregate your news and your social media updates! One such program that I use is called Socialite.
So while you’re having your morning coffee you can check your social media updates, catch up on the latest stock tips, and see what’s going on with your favorite TV show all in under 5 minutes.
That concludes today’s topic.
Stay tuned for our next post. Is there really a difference between different web browsers? This is going to be a 3-4 part series starting out with basic concepts for everybody and ending with advanced concepts for developers covering browser rendering engines.