Dante
Apr 7th '04, 04:58 PM
I was showing D-Bone the other day about the usefulness of RSS Newsfeeds. What caught me by surprise is that D-Bone didn't really know about newsfeeds and how nice newsfeeds are. A similar conversation was held with Kyraath just this morning. So after educated Kyraath, too, he suggested I post about RSS newsfeeds in the forum and start a collection thread with everyones favorite newsfeed or any cool feeds that we may stumble across and are too good to keep to yourself.
But first I feel I need to do a little public education for everyone else that may not be 'in-the-know' about newsfeeds. If you're clueless about RSS, this post is for you.
What is RSS?
Basically, it's a mechanism for publishing (syndicating) and subscribing to recent additions to any website -- usually a news site or a weblog.
How Does It Work?
The RSS software tracks new posts on your blog, or your favourite news site, packages them all up in a standard format, called a feed, and sends them to anyone who has 'subscribed' to them. All your RSS feeds are integrated together, creating a kind of personalized newspaper. Some RSS feeds contain the entire article, while others offer just the headline, or the headline with the first part of the article, with a link to the full article.
How Do You Subscribe to an RSS 'feed'?
First you need to have a news aggregator (sometimes called a 'newsreader'), a software tool that collects and displays the feeds you choose to subscribe to. The one I use is called Feed Demon (http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp), but Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/), NewsGator (http://www.newsgator.com/), and many other news aggregators (http://www.lights.com/weblogs/rss.html) operate similarly. Most are free, and each has slightly different features. I prefer Feed Demon because you can organize your neewfeeds into groups and then read the entire group as a newspaper instead of thumbing through each thread one at a time.
To subscribe to the RSS feeds for your favourite news sites and blogs: Go to the site and find the URL for its RSS feed -- there will be a small orange box saying 'XML", or a link that says 'subscribe/syndicate this site'. When you've found it, right click on the box or link and 'copy link location'. Then go to your news aggregator and paste the copied link (it usually ends with .xml or .rdf) into the aggregator's 'subscribe' box.
Some news aggregators, and RSS catalogues like Syndic8 (http://www.syndic8.com) will even look up the RSS URL for you -- all you need to do is enter the name of the news source or blog, or its regular URL, and it will save you searching for the sometimes hard-to-find RSS link. Some news aggregators and channel builders like MyRSS (http://myrss.com/new.html) can create a synthetic RSS feed for sources that don't have one.
Why Would You Want to Subscribe to an RSS feed?
Unlike e-mail subscriptions, RSS feeds don't clutter your e-mail inbox. News aggregators also give you more flexibility in what you subscribe to than e-mail subscriptions, and more flexibility in how information is displayed. And if you read a lot, it can save you time compared to browsing all the sources in your blogroll or Favorites folder. And it's spam-free. But it's not for everyone -- some people prefer browsing serendipitously, or like looking at blogrolls and other sidebar contents (which don't make it into RSS feeds) -- and a huge backlog of unread RSS feeds can by intimidating, even tyrannical.
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Now that you have a basic understanding of what RSS feeds are all about, you'll be surprised to find that many of your favorite websites have this system in place (expect for forums, of course).
Now go forth and bring your favorite newsfeed back here and post it! :D
But first I feel I need to do a little public education for everyone else that may not be 'in-the-know' about newsfeeds. If you're clueless about RSS, this post is for you.
What is RSS?
Basically, it's a mechanism for publishing (syndicating) and subscribing to recent additions to any website -- usually a news site or a weblog.
How Does It Work?
The RSS software tracks new posts on your blog, or your favourite news site, packages them all up in a standard format, called a feed, and sends them to anyone who has 'subscribed' to them. All your RSS feeds are integrated together, creating a kind of personalized newspaper. Some RSS feeds contain the entire article, while others offer just the headline, or the headline with the first part of the article, with a link to the full article.
How Do You Subscribe to an RSS 'feed'?
First you need to have a news aggregator (sometimes called a 'newsreader'), a software tool that collects and displays the feeds you choose to subscribe to. The one I use is called Feed Demon (http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp), but Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/), NewsGator (http://www.newsgator.com/), and many other news aggregators (http://www.lights.com/weblogs/rss.html) operate similarly. Most are free, and each has slightly different features. I prefer Feed Demon because you can organize your neewfeeds into groups and then read the entire group as a newspaper instead of thumbing through each thread one at a time.
To subscribe to the RSS feeds for your favourite news sites and blogs: Go to the site and find the URL for its RSS feed -- there will be a small orange box saying 'XML", or a link that says 'subscribe/syndicate this site'. When you've found it, right click on the box or link and 'copy link location'. Then go to your news aggregator and paste the copied link (it usually ends with .xml or .rdf) into the aggregator's 'subscribe' box.
Some news aggregators, and RSS catalogues like Syndic8 (http://www.syndic8.com) will even look up the RSS URL for you -- all you need to do is enter the name of the news source or blog, or its regular URL, and it will save you searching for the sometimes hard-to-find RSS link. Some news aggregators and channel builders like MyRSS (http://myrss.com/new.html) can create a synthetic RSS feed for sources that don't have one.
Why Would You Want to Subscribe to an RSS feed?
Unlike e-mail subscriptions, RSS feeds don't clutter your e-mail inbox. News aggregators also give you more flexibility in what you subscribe to than e-mail subscriptions, and more flexibility in how information is displayed. And if you read a lot, it can save you time compared to browsing all the sources in your blogroll or Favorites folder. And it's spam-free. But it's not for everyone -- some people prefer browsing serendipitously, or like looking at blogrolls and other sidebar contents (which don't make it into RSS feeds) -- and a huge backlog of unread RSS feeds can by intimidating, even tyrannical.
-----
Now that you have a basic understanding of what RSS feeds are all about, you'll be surprised to find that many of your favorite websites have this system in place (expect for forums, of course).
Now go forth and bring your favorite newsfeed back here and post it! :D