c o l l i s i o n b e n d . c o m

I recently read that only 5% of Internet users currently use RSS.

For those of you who aren’t aware of this technology, RSS stands for either “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”; what it does is really quite simple, actually: if you frequent a website, how often are you frustrated because the site hasn’t updated since you last visited? Wouldn’t you like to know in advance if there has been an update so that you don’t waste your time checking and re-checking?

Well, that’s what RSS does: an RSS/XML feed is a small data packet that, in essence, is sent to a syndication server that basically tells it to ping your RSS news feed reader (or aggregator) to alert you to new content. Not really, but that’s close enough for government work. The upshot of this is that you no longer have to visit a web site every four hours or so to see if there’s new content — and if there is, you won’t have to weed through dozens of articles before you find what you want to read. RSS sorts all of this for you.

Neat, huh?

The real frustrating part of this is that very few web sites that offer an RSS feed actually offer a primer on how to use the feature. And if you look real hard, you’ll find that I don’t, either — and I work for a company that promotes this technology! So, as partly a make-up for my sins, and as a primer to the point of this post, I’ll explain how to use RSS.

All too often I hear about someone who actually clicks on the RSS link and sees a file that looks like this.

The usual response, quite naturally: “WTF is this?”

What you were just looking at, Dear Constant Reader, is an XML file that describes the feed. What the file is to you, for the most part, is immaterial, save for its function; what is important to know is that an XML file of this nature is essentially a list of attributes that describe the document in question.

I could get more technical about it (and this Wikipedia article has a lot of good information and supporting links), but it would probably bore you to tears, so I won’t; it’s just plain-old boring stuff, and as the moniker RSS implies, “Really, Simple, & Stupid.” The simple fact that it exists and it works is all you ever need to know or care about, aside from knowing what to do if you want to subscribe to the content feed.

Obviously, when you open that file, you get a hash of gobbledy-gook. So don’t try to open the file. Don’t even click on it.

What you need to subscribe to a feed is some sort of RSS aggregation program. Sounds technical, right? Not really; it’s just a program that collects this kind of stuff for you, that’s all. Sometimes they call this kind of program a “news reader.”

There are several software packages that you can download to do this for you, both for free and for fee, or if you use the Firefox browser or Thunderbird email client, you can add one of several free extensions to your program to handle this for you. Alternatively, there are web-based aggregators that you can use, as well, although I have found most of these to be cumbersome and difficult (even constipating!) to use on a regular basis. More on that later.

I have used Feed Demon (pay software). It’s nice, and it works a lot like the Sage plug-in for Firefox, except that it will actually deliver a rendered page for you to view rather than a stark, divided text page. It’s fairly easy to use and maintain. My gripe with it is that you have to pay for it; in this day and age of rampant, open-source software that works as well as pay software, why pay?

One Firefox-based plug-in that I have used most frequently (and effectively) is the aforementioned Sage, which will open the list of my feeds in a side panel in my browser. All I have to do is click on the search button and it starts to cycle through my feeds. When a feed name goes bold, I know it has found new content; click on the name and the Sage page loads in my browser window, showing me the last ten (or so) articles posted by the website in question. Click on the title of an article, and you’re taken directly to that post. No bold print in the RSS pane? No new article — move on and save your time. Adding a feed is easy: if you have the Sage pane open, and you’re at the web site you want to subscribe to, then all you have to do is click the search button in the Sage pane (it looks like a magnifying glass), and it’ll find the feed for you. Click on the “Add Feed” button and you’re all set.

If you’re a Mac OS X user, just open Safari and start looking through your menu bar — you’ll find your RSS aggregator built right into the browser. It’s just about as simple to use as the Sage plug-in for Firefox.

I have also used the standard RSS feed extension in Thunderbird, my email client at home. It works well, and not only will it bold-type the feed name when there is a new article, it’ll also give you a number as to how many new articles exist since you checked last! My gripe is that it is separate from the browser, like Feed Demon, requiring you to move from one program to another in order to catch the actual web site. The Firefox Sage plug-in, I feel, is more efficient for the way I work.

Then we have the web-based services like Bloglines. Bloglines aggregates just about every feed out there. If you create a free account, you can subscribe right there in your browser window to the feed you like, and read the article right there, no muss, no fuss. Problem is, there are close to 18,000,000 blogs with RSS feeds alone right now, not including thousands of news sites like CNN with a number of feeds of their own (CNN has somewhere around 34 feeds)! That’s a lot of feeds to wade through.

To check out this service, I recently went to Bloglines to find my own feed to see how it looked on their site. I looked into the “C” section (that didn’t sound quite right, now did it?), and paged through to find Collision Bend. Guess what? Four hours later, I found it; the search function didn’t (which is why I had to search manually in the first place). Great idea, but not real convenient to use, if you ask me — and I read close to 100 feeds every day.

And because everyone browses the Internet differently, uses their computers differently, etc., there are many options here, so don’t go thinking that bloglines is the only choice just because it’s the only one I’ve listed here so far.

Yesterday, in fact, we were presented with another option — Google Reader. I’m currently testing it to see how well it works; I’ll report on it later to you. So far, I like its interface: it’s clean and easy to read, and the menuing system is quite slick and well thought-out (so far). It’s fairly easy to use; all you have to do is copy-paste the address of the feed into the little window in the page and hit Preview. If it retrieves the proper article (probably the same one you were looking at before), then you click on “Subscribe to the feed,” and it’ll appear in your subscription list. The next time you log on to Google Reader, it’ll show you the latest posts.

To make things even nicer, if you use Firefox, by right-clicking on the little orange XML logo, or the text RSS link like I have to the lower right, you’ll see a menu item in the contextual popup menu that says, “Copy Link Location.” Click that and the address is automagically placed on your clipboard, ready to paste into a text box. Cool, huh? (Now do you see why I am such a proponent of the Firefox browser? Simply, they think of everything!)

One issue I have with Google Reader already is the simple fact that it’s Google: if I have Gmail, the Google toolbar, Google desktop search, and now Google Reader — isn’t that telling Google a little too much about my habits? Aren’t they getting a little too close to home? TMI? What if I like to search for extremely kinky “pr0n” on Google — and I have a job with super-ultra-high importance?

It could be a crash waiting to happen, and I don’t like the sound — or feel — of that, for me or anyone else. Not that I search for that kind of stuff, mind you; I have barely enough time to blog! But I’m one of those who like to surf the web somewhat anonymously, and I really don’t want others to know what I’m up to, as it’s none of their business. That’s why I don’t use the wallet functions on either my Windows or Mac boxes: I just don’t trust people on the Internet.

So I’ll test Google Reader for a while and let you know how it works. For a lot of folks on the web, I’m sure it’ll be a true time saver and a Godsend — just as RSS has been for me.