The Joy of RSS

I know a few of my friends aren’t yet making use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, so I thought I’d write a little post to help drag them into the 21st century. Even a programmer friend of mine, a technically-savvy individual, is still using bookmarks for his news sites and comics. Bookmarks! How embarrassing!

If you frequent more than three websites, you should really be using RSS feeds. For those who haven’t heard of it, RSS allows websites to publish content to feeds that can be monitored for updates by feed readers (aggregators). If this seems confusing, don’t worry – you don’t really need to know how it works, just how to use it.

As an example, if you add looselogic.com to your feed reader, every time I write a weblog post it will automatically display in your reader as an unread entry. Once you’ve finished reading it, you can mark it as being read, much like you would within an e-mail client.

The first decision you need to make when choosing a feed reader is whether to use a web application or a local application. I prefer to use a web application for this, since you can access it from any computer and keep your settings. With a web application, if you mark everything in your feed reader as read at home, when you check it at work those entries will still be read. If you use a local application, you’ll have to install it on each computer you want to use, and they won’t be synchronized with each other.

The two web applications I’ve used are Bloglines and Google Reader. I started with Bloglines and recently moved over to Google to give it a try. Both applications are great, but I like how Google only marks the posts you’ve scrolled over as read, where as Bloglines will mark the entire feed as read as soon as you click on it. Luckily, you can export your feeds, with any directories you’ve created, into an OPML file that can be imported into other readers, so trying a few different applications is fairly painless.

Below I’ve listed how I’ve set up my RSS feeds, to give a better idea of their utility.

Announcements

Feeds of news releases from various companies.

Comics

The web comics I read. Most websites these days have both their comics and their news postings on the same feed.

Cooking

Cooking-related feeds. Mainly food weblogs that post recipes every now and then.

Education

Not the best category name, but this basically consists of feeds for random informational sites. Some examples are Word of the Day, Your Daily Art, Mirabilis.ca, and I Did Not Know That Yesterday.

Gaming

News feeds from gaming sites. Gaming news, reviews, announcements, trailers, demos, etc.

Literature

News feeds from, you guessed it, literature-themed sites. Random literature articles, book reviews, writing tips, that sort of thing.

Loose Logic

The feeds from this very site. One for the posts, just to monitor them, and one for the site’s comments.

Music

Music news and weblogs.

News

World and local news. Still trying to find the right sites to use for this, to get the most news with the least amount of spam. BBC News and CBC are two good starting points. Both sites offer a full list of feeds, from headlines and world news to local and special-topic news.

Personal

All of the non-commercial, variety weblogs I frequent and Twitter.

Personal Development

Do It Yourself, personal finance, and life hack sites. Any of that Getting Things Done, personal development hogwash.

Photography

Photography weblogs, my Flickr comments feed, and the feed for my Flickr contacts’ photos.

Randomness

Just randomness, really. Digg, Metafilter, and their ilk.

Theatre Showtimes

The showtimes for my local theatres, provided by iSnoop.net.

Travel

Travel-themed weblogs.

Video

Video weblogs, such as Ask a Ninja and It’s JerryTime. For when I’m very, very bored.

Work

Work related feeds.

I wouldn’t typically have the time to read everything listed here. I’ve often, in the past, set up a similar schema using bookmarks, but it was just too cumbersome to browse through all of these websites once a day. Since setting them up using RSS feeds, it’s a breeze. I check it a few times a day, read everything that’s been updated, and I’m all caught up.

RSS feeds save me a lot of time, and I’m constantly finding more uses for them. If you subscribe to a useful feed that I haven’t mentioned, let me know!