Let Information Come To You

September 20th, 2006

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As I’m sure you guys probably know by now, I read a large variety of websites on a daily basis, scouring the web for all that is new and interesting. However, of this large variety, I used to frequent the same 30 websites everyday, jumping from site to site after reading the new articles, and then checking back throughout the day for changes. This process was extremely inefficient.

Enter RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and RSS can completely change how you browse the internet. Basically, RSS technology allows websites to offer feeds, or a up-to-the-minute list of articles, that people can subscribe to. Each time someone posts something on an RSS-enabled website, that article is added to the website’s RSS feed, and a notification is sent out to any subscribers.The beauty of RSS is that the notification doesn’t merely say that something on the website has changed – the notification is the headline and a portion (if not all) of the article itself. These RSS notifications can be gathered from almost all of the websites by any number of RSS Readers (or aggregators).

Some RSS readers are browser based, some are web-based, and some are program based. Below are some you can check out:

Web Based:

Browser Based:

Program Based:

OSX

Windows

Personally, I use Google Reader and I love the simplicity, labels, Google Account integration so I highly recommend that one, though there are other very good RSS readers out there. In fact, you can see all of my subscriptions by subscribing to this link, or sign up for Google Reader here.As time passes, more and more websites add RSS feeds – news sites, fashion sites, technology sites, law sites, music sites, library sites, and blogs (of course), pretty much all major sites have feeds that you can subscribe to. Any site that you see has icon above somewhere on it, has an RSS feed you can subscribe to. You can even have your RSS News feeds come to you in a newspaper format!RSS is a very efficient way to browse the web, and I highly recommend you take advantage of it.

Incidentally, if you want notification every time I have a new interesting find, subscribe to this link ;) . Happy Browsing!

my writing

my website is a collection of my work and writing since 2004, so please don't be surprised if things seem a little outdated, particularly in the technology section. That said, the concepts behind most posts should be interesting given all that's happened since they were written so enjoy!