Tech Geek

You've probably seen the initials RSS or seen the logo on a website or blog that you read but maybe you haven't understood what makes RSS tick. Even as a geek, I didn't get it for a long time. I'd read other geeks talking about how great RSS was, but I didn't see the use. It just looked like another form of getting information that I didn't need. So I ignored it for a long time. Then two things happened. A few of my friends started blogs that I was actually interested in keeping up with and I found an on-line RSS Reader. That's when it began to make sense to me.

RSS originally stood for Rich Site Summary but the acronym has evolved to now mean Really Simple Syndication. The concept is to provide a simple way to let you know when a site has updated content. This content can be a web page, blog post, podcast, or just about anything else. As a user, you subscribe to the feed with a feed reader. Generally, you'll get a snapshot of the content and then, when you click a link, be taken to the full content. The beauty of a reader is that it keeps track of what you have and haven't read.

There are lots of feed readers out there that let you subscribe to RSS feeds, and their similar standard, Atom feeds. They come in two flavors, web-based, and desktop-based. Some of the desktop ones look similar to many e-mail programs. The Firefox browser lets you subscribe to feeds as Live Bookmarks that update the links every so often. This is great for things like news headlines.

A web-based reader is my preference, because I tend to operate from different computers and don't want to have to mark items as read in two or three different places. I use Google Reader to track a variety of blogs, so that I don't have to visit them each day to see if there has been a post. When there is a post, it shows up on my screen. If there isn't one, I don't see anything and don't use any time visiting a blog to see if there happens to be something. I also track a variety of news sources. I can quickly skim the headlines and then read the stories I'm interested in. I follow international, national, and even local news that way, plus anything in the Pittsburgh paper about the Steelers!

Wikipedia has a list of desktop-based and web-based readers here so that you can find the one that works for you.

Common Craft has a video that also explains RSS (far better than me) in plain english here. Watch this video even if nothing I said to this point made sense to you!