3 Easy steps to start reading RSS feeds
Posted on 12. Apr, 2008 by miguel in technology
Most of the Internet users have a group of favourite websites that they visit frecuently. Before 2004, to get updated of their latest content, it was necesary to visit each site one by one on your web browser.
Fortunately, some of them such as Opera or Firefox, started to include a tabbed browsing system, so you can open all of your favourites at the same time on different tabs. Still it was a help at the time, it wasn’t a solution.
In 2005 a new family of buttons and links started to appear on a growing number of websites representing RSS formats. They let us to automatically get the latest content from our favourite sites. And it’s possible to group all those feeds on a RSS reader to gather all the information on a single place, a feed aggregator. No more browsing and time wasting.
The process is really simple as RSS means now Really Simple Syndication ;) But first, you need a feed aggregator (also known as RSS reader, feed reader or news reader). You’ll find a bunch of client software that can be installed on your computer, although there are a lot of Web based applications that work great and don’t need any installation or maintenance. I’ll use Netvibes for the example.
How to add a feed to your aggregator on three easy steps:
- Go to one of your favourite sites and look for a RSS icon/link. Right click over it and select “Copy link location”.
- Open your feed aggregator, click on any “Add feed” option and paste the URL that you have copied before.
- The aggregator will check the feed and, if validated, it will be added to the rest of your feeds.
Now you can create your own newspaper by adding as RSS feeds as information sources you usually read.
There are also media aggregators (i.e.: Miro, Amarok, iTunes, Songbird, etc.) and I’ll talk about them soon.
More information on history of web syndication technology .
