The Daily Background

There’s a great technology out there for bloggers and blog readers alike. It’s been gaining in popularity for some time now, and it helps us keep up with the news and our favorite websites (blogs, etc) without having to constantly hit refresh pages. In fact, you’ve probably already heard of it (although it’s possible that it’s never been fully explained to you). It’s called RSS.

RSS- What is it?
RSS (sometimes called XML) is a technology. Actually, a really cool one. The idea is that it’s like getting email updates from your favorite websites (such as news websites, your favorite blogs, and so on), delivered to your computer 24×7, for free. It helps us keep track of what’s going on- and also makes sure we never miss an important article or posting.

Okay, so how do I use it?
It’s actually super easy. RSS is broadcast from websites to readers like you or me through channels called “feeds.” To read these “feeds,” we need to install a special program on our computer. Many software makers have made several different programs which read RSS and they all work about the same way, so (like choosing a which web browser you use), choosing an RSS Reader (also sometimes called an “aggregator”) is mostly about your personal preference.

No matter which operating system your computer uses (whether it be a Windows Operating System, a Mac Operating System, Linux, and so on), there are several freely downloadable RSS Readers for you to choose from. Let’s take a look at some of your options (all of which are freely downloadable).

If You Use Microsoft Windows…
SharpReader

If You Use Mac OSX…
NetNewsWire RSS Reader

If You Use Linux…
Straw RSS Aggregator

You can also find a lot more choices of other RSS Readers/Aggregators (some of which work differently, like by sending RSS feeds to your email, or through a special website specific to you that you can check anywhere) here.

All right, I’ve got my RSS Reader- What now?
While it would be impossible for me to give you specific instructions as to how to use your specific RSS Aggregation program (because there are so many of them and I don’t know which you’ve picked), I can give you a general walkthrough. If this isn’t enough, I suggest looking on the website that makes your feed reader and reading their documentation.

Step One: Launch your feed reader.
Duh. Open the new program, silly.

Step Two: Find the Address of your favorite website’s “Feeds”
Not all websites have RSS feeds, but many do. To find out whether or not your favorite websites have feeds which you can “subscribe” to using your RSS Reader, you’re going to have to do a little detective work with each site. Look for the words “RSS,” “XML,” “Feed,” “Atom” or some combination of these. Often times orange symbols will accompany these.

Step Three: Subscribe!
Since I can’t tell you how to do this with each site, we’ll go through an example with this site, TheDailyBackground.com. We display a link to our RSS Feed in our lefthand sidebar in a section called Reader Tools. We’ve got a link there (and a cute little orange icon), to our RSS Feed. If you click on it, it’ll bring you to a website with a listing of our recent entries. On other websites, clicking an RSS Feed link might bring you to a lot of code mumbo jumbo that doesn’t make much sense.

But that’s okay, because you’re not reading the RSS Feed in your web browser, you’ll be reading it in your new RSS Feed Reader. So copy the link to the RSS feed you want to subscribe to- for example http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDailyBackground Often times these links will end in a “.xml,” or a “.rss“.

Now, go into your RSS Feed Reader (whichever one you’ve chosen), and find the place to add a new RSS Feed. I can’t tell you exactly how to do this with your Feed Reader, but you should be able to find it pretty easily. Oftentimes it’ll be something like “Add Feed,” “Subscribe to New,” or along those lines. Then, all you’ve got to do is paste in that link (ex: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheDailyBackground), and hit OK. Then you’re good to go, and you’ll recieve updates from the website you’ve subscribed to in your RSS Reder as they’re published. Pretty neat, huh?

Now you can go through your bookmarks, and look for sites that have RSS Feeds available to subscribe to, just like you did with TheDailyBackground. Tons of sites have them, like the New York Times, BBC World News, as well as most blog sites, like DailyKos, and Crooks & Liars.

Next time you’re surfing a cool website, keep on the lookout for those RSS, XML, and Atom Feeds. Your RSS reader reads them all, and you can subscribe to tons of websites to make keeping up with the news and blogs easier than its ever been before. For example, personally I’m subscribed to dozens of RSS feeds- so many that it’d be very difficult to keep up with all these websites on their own. But with RSS, it’s much easier and more managable.

Filed under: Site, Z-TDB Blog