04-27-2009
What is RSS ?
Ever wondered what that little orange icon is at the bottom of so many WebPages, you know, the one with the white squiggly lines? Do the letters RSS keep showing up on your cyber-journeys but you don’t know what to make of them? You may have seen them on the BBC, at CNN… and even here at MAETTA!
Well, if you find yourself wasting time by going to the same websites over and over again to see what— if anything— is new and you do not want the hassle of email newsletters, but you would like your own all-killer-no-filler customized newspaper on your desktop that provides you with all the latest developments from your favourite sites as soon as they appear online, then an RSS feed is for you.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) basically does the work for you, according to Dave Winer, the programmer who developed RSS:
“When people ask me what RSS is, I say it’s automated web surfing. We took something lots of people do, visiting sites looking for new stuff, and automated it. It’s a very predictable thing, that’s what computers do — automate repetitive things.”
So, how do you get started? After swinging by the definitive RSS guide, www.WhatIsRSS.com, which is so good that I’ve borrowed from it extensively (yes, it’s THAT good) you will need to find an RSS Reader.
The choice is yours: My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are all popular feed readers.
Done? Now all that is left is for you to do one last bit of intrepid reporting: go to your sites of choice and see if they are cooking RSS. Here’s a tip— small icons tattooed RSS, XML, or RDF are what you’re after. Then subscribe. That easy? You bet.
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