Feed Me!

A few weeks ago at church camp, I was sitting around having a chat a few friends who have blogs and neither of them knew about RSS feeds. Now that a person doesn't know about RSS feeds isn't too surprising (the current version of MS Internet Explorer doesn't support RSS feeds so the bulk of Internet users won't discover them until IE7 is released), but that someone who has a blog (which by most definitions must include an RSS feed) doesn't know about RSS feeds is a little surprising.

I find using RSS feeds well makes getting information from the web more efficient, so I thought I'd explain a little about what RSS is and how you can use it to improve your web browsing experience.

What is an RSS feed?

An RSS feed is actually just a simple file that sits on a web server – a lot like an HTML file. (You can look at the RSS file for irRegularExpressions here.) The only thing special about this file is that the content in it allows feed readers to know if a website has been updated or changed. So instead of having to visit a site to see if it's been updated, your feed reader looks at the RSS feed and quickly tells you if anything has changed.

How do I use RSS

Websites that provide an RSS feed normally provide a link to the file. They'll often use an icon like this or words like "Feed", "Syndicate", "Subscribe" or references to the protocol that the feed uses, "RSS", "ATOM", "RDF". If you are using firefox as your web browser (or when the next version of Internet Explorer is released) you will also see the icon from the start of this post next to the name of the website you're visiting.

To take advantage of the feed you need to use what is called an aggregator or a feed reader. Just like in using email you can either install a program on your own computer to do this or use a web-based service. I use bloglines which is a web site which allows me to keep track of updated news from a variety of sources. (You can have a look at the feeds I subscribe to by viewing my public bloglines page.) If you would prefer to install a feed reader on your own machine, then there's a great list of feed readers at about.com.

If you prefer to live in the email world, there are also a few services (like squeet that will send RSS feeds as email.

To subscribe to the a feed for a website, just right click on the link and select "Copy Link Location" or "Copy Shortcut" and paste the link into your feed reader. Then it's just a matter of checking for updates the same way you check for emails (there are some RSS readers that integrate into MS Outlook, so reading RSS feeds is exactly like reading emails, and Thunderbird already supports RSS feeds).

Why would I care about RSS feeds?

Lots of websites that you visit regularly (or irregularly, no pun intended) have RSS feeds. If you use the Internet to get your news, then odds are the news source that you read (e.g. Sydney Morning Herald) provides a feed so that you can keep up to date with the latest news. By subscribing to the feed you can both keep up-to-date with the latest news as well as keep track of multiple news sources from one place.

So what are you waiting for? To help you get started with feeds, I'll give you a few put the links here to a few very useful Australian news-feeds.

http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/top.rss: Sydney Morning Herald – Top News Headlines

http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/national.rss: Sydney Morning Herald – National Headlines

http://feeds.smh.com.au/rssheadlines/world.rss: Sydney Morning Herld – World Headlines

http://www.sydneyanglicans.net/feeds/rss/atw/: SydneyAnglican – Around the Web (Christian related stories from all around the web)