Despite the fact Radio Userland
provides an integrated RSS news aggregator with its blog tool, it would
appear that most Userland users, like most bloggers in general, don't
use this feature. In fact a number of bloggers don't really know what
that funny orange box in the corner of their blog is for, or how to use
it. 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. Radio Userland has one built in. The one I use
is called Bloglines, but Feed
Demon, NewsGator, and many
other news aggregators operate similarly. They're free, and each has
slightly
different features.
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 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 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.
Why Would You Want to Have an
RSS feed?
It's another way to get your
message out, and to find readers for your
writing. It reduces the chance that your most faithful readers will
miss some of your posts by forgetting to visit, or will see
time-sensitive posts too late. Some people won't even read sources that
don't offer RSS feeds, claiming they don't have time. Dave Winer now
offers a service to let you see
who subscribes to your RSS feed, to complement your Technorati
inbound links so you have a better sense of who your entire readership
is.
Next Steps
If you want to try out
subscribing to RSS feeds, to see if you like
them, pick one of the free news aggregators, subscribe to a dozen or
two of your favourite news sources or blogs, and look at the feeds once
a day for a week. After that trial period you'll probably either make
your aggregator your one-stop shop for news and blog-reading, or decide
it's not for you
and go back to browsing your blogroll or Favorites folder sites. And if
you prefer your RSS feeds by e-mail, Bloglet can send them to
you that way, too.
If you want to set up an RSS feed
for your blog, unless you're a Radio
Userland blogger you'll have to check out the instructions for your
particular blog tool (they're all different). Or you can simply provide
a link to one of the services like Bloglines that create a synthetic
RSS feed for you. And if this is all too complicated for you, Bloglet lets you offer
your readers a daily e-mail digest of your posts (or your RSS feed)
instead.
And if you do have an RSS feed
already, do your readers a favour and
put the link where people can find it. Mine is the little orange box
just below the search bar, upper right. The URL is http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/rss.xml.
Just right click, Copy Link Location into your news aggregator, and get
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