As blogs make it easier to publish more information, the process of finding information becomes more difficult. This makes keeping up with the Blogs harder than keeping up with the Jones!
Consider one of two options to keeping up with the feeds:
- Check and read every blog/web site of interest to you all the time (daily), wasting all of your time and energy doing so.
- Ignore the blogs and use a search engine when ever you need information – but now you don’t keep up with things as they happen.
Neither of these are good things. The early developers of blogs knew this, so they create a way to let people automatically know about new postings. This is done through Really Simple Syndication, often referred to as RSS. RSS is a special file format that can be read by RSS Readers to alert users of updates.
RSS readers come in several forms. They can be a like a normal desktop application, built into most modern browsers, or web based services.
What they do is periodically check RSS feeds that you “subscribe” to, and alert the user when changes occur. If the Blog post a full feed, you don’t even have to leave your reader to view the post. Partial feeds give you a summary of the posting, or the first few paragraphs and require you to go to the site to see the full article.
You will find that different RSS reader applications provide different levels of usage. I used the built in feature to the Firefox browser at first. I was able to track 10 – 12 blogs that way. Unfortunately, it didn’t show me which posts I’d already seen, and it only lets you see titles, no summaries or full postings. This created a lot of wasted time.
Then I switched to Google Reader. Now I track over 120 blogs, and can even share items with others, because it lets me operate more efficiently. I track things that help me to do my job better, (Web technologies, database feeds, web analytics, search engine information) as well as news, cartoons, historical notes, and Feakenomics. Like most reader software, it allows me to mark items as being read (so I don’t continue to see them) star them for importance, and share favorite postings.
Because RSS can be used for many different purposes, I’ve been able to track regular postings, as well as meeting announcements, on-line classes, and more.
May 1st is RSS Awareness day. While a week and a half away, it is a good time to learn about how it can help simplify your life.
photo credit: Chesi – Fotos CC
About Walter Wimberly