RSS - not so simple after all!
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication but judging from the questions I have received recently, from a user perspective its not really simple at all! Basically, RSS is a means by which information can be published and made available over the Internet to interested parties in one central place. For a user, this means that you can subscribe to information you want from specific blogs, news feeds, e-zines and so on and have this information sent directly to you in real time as updates are made.
How many times have you found a really neat article when surfing the web and haven’t been able to find its subsequent posts when you go to look again? I do it all the time. RSS helps you get around this by allowing you to subscribe to have the information sent to you. I like to use the traditional media analogy of having the newspaper delivered to your doorstep each time its published.
So what do you need as a user to take advantage of these feeds? There are 3 necessary steps.
Step 1
First of all you need to have access to software that allows you to read the feed. You have are 3 main options to do this:
- e-mail,
- a blog or article reader such as - Feedreader or Newsgator or
- a portal like Google or Firefox.
Each option has pros and cons: the benefit of using e-mail is that it is a familiar environment but I’ve found that not all feeds allow e-mail output so it can limit the information available to you; feed readers are excellent if you like your in-formation in bulk and want to sort it easily but you do have to download an application that lets you do this so its more time consuming and restricts you to your own desktop. My personal preference is to use my Google portal to add feeds as it means I can ac-cess it easily wherever I go. (Click on “perzonalise this page” at the top right of the classic google search to get started).
Step 2
Once you have chosen the means by which you want to receive the information, simply locate the feed button. If the website in question has the RSS button - it most commonly looks like this: 
Click on that and a screen will come up giving you subscription options like these:
Choose the button applicable to the method you have chosen to get your feeds. For me it would be the Add to Google button. For someone using the Newsgator reader they would click on the Newsgator button. Once you’ve clicked, you will step through a brief process to establish the feed.
Step 3
Sit back and wait for the information you’re interested in to come to you then enjoy reading it at your convenience.
Did I make it sound simple? Well unfortunately is isn’t always that easy. I guarantee that you are going to run into issues and difficulties from time to time when accessing your feeds and that these will make you scratch your head - so be prepared to be frustrated now and then. RSS has a counterpart called Atom that complicates things as some readers can’t read both. There will be occasions when you try to subscribe to a feed that doesn’t support your reader (you’ll likely get some XML blurb). Until such times as information aggregation becomes more standardised, I am resigned to the fact that I’ll just have to put up with it.
For more technincal details on RSS Feeds: http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.php#what
Many thanks to Mhairi Petrovic of Outsmart, for writing this article exclusively for Bluelime Media.
[...] wrote an article recently for Bluelime Media called “RSS not so simple after all!” that talked about RSS from the user perspective. Now I want to look at RSS from the corporate [...]
[...] the post for Bluelime Media - RSS- not so simple after all, I looked at RSS from the user perspective in an effort simplify and explain how RSS works and how [...]
[...] If themed groups aren’t your thing, you can add your friends to your network and see what’s new in their bookmarks from time to time, or even subscribe to them via RSS. [...]