RSS Feeds

Sunday, 30 April, 2006

Whilst I use RSS feeds all the time, my impression is that most web users are not aware of how the technology can really benefit. Whilst the web providesa rich interface to access information, most people find that they continually visit certain sites to obtain new and up-to-date information. When this selection of sites exceeds half a dozen it becomes a real chore; enter RSS. All new news items are placed in a machine readable text file on the remote website; you can then let your PC go off check to see if there are any new items and bring them back together. Given that this is automatic it makes monitoring 30, 50 or 100 websites (including blogs) very easy. The BBC have a good introduction to RSS (and links to their RSS feeds) here.

In terms of software I use either Sage, which is an extension for Firefox (and therefore operates within the browser and bookmark system) or SharpReader. The latter has a superior range of features but may not always suite. There are may other feed readers (also called news aggregators) around, some of which are listed at the BBC site above.

Whilst some sites (e.g. BBC) maintain very up-to-date RSS feeds, the blogging paradigm is now being used to maintain whole websites of content, automatically generating RSS feeds (such as the one on this site). I principally use SharpReader to keep me on top of the growing list of blogs/sites I have.

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