Practical RSS: Introduction To RSS - Episode 1
Show #1 - This is the first episode in the series "Practical RSS". It introduces RSS conceptually, discusses tools for accessing it, and walks through a basic use case with it. Practical RSS is a new series focusing on the tools and site you need to know about to unlock the power of RSS.
Step 1: Introduction
Welcome to practical RSS where we look at ways you can leverage RSS to keep up to date with the topics you care about. I’m John Mahoney, and I’ll be your host.
Step 2:
Since this is our first episode I figured I’d start with an overview with what RSS is, where you can find it, and then show you a simple way to start making use of it. We have a lot to cover so let’s get started.
Step 3:
There are a lot of things I’m interested in; technology, video production, sports, finance. Not to mention new music from iTunes or new blog posts from my friends. I used to have to visit quite a few sites just to keep up with it all, but now through the power of RSS, things are a lot simpler.
Step 4: What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s an easy way for websites to notify you when content like news stories, blog posts, or even video podcasts like this one are added to their site. RSS frees you from having to go visit each site individually to see if anything new is there. The sites there now come to you, and let you know what’s changed. These notifications that sites provide are called RSS feeds.
Step 5: What does an RSS feed look like?
So, what does an RSS feed look like? Technically, it looks like this. It’s an XML formatted file. But that’s all behind the scenes, here’s what you’ll typically see when looking at an RSS feed. There’s a headline and a brief synopsis of all of the most recently added or changed items on a site, and each headline has a direct link back to the web page it came from. These can include any type of content in any format; html, PDF, audio-video, or images. If you can link to it on the web it’ll work with RSS.
Step 6: Using RSS
RSS is an easy to use, elegant solution for keeping track of web-based information. So how can you find an RSS feed on a web page? Well, when RSS first started getting some traction, there was no standard way of indicating that a particular link was for an RSS feed. So people tended to go a little crazy and created all different types of buttons and logos to highlight their feed links. Well fortunately, things settled down quite a bit. Rectangular buttons like these became the standard feed icons most people use. And more recently, people have also started using this icon, which was introduced with the popular open-source browser, Fire Fox.
Step 7: Spotting feeds
Once you get used to looking for them, most feeds will really be pretty easy to spot. And since there are tens of thousands of high quality feeds available already, and quickly growing, there will be plenty of places to spot them. So how do these feeds all come together? When you find a feed on a subject that you’re interested in and would like to keep track of, you need to subscribe to it and to do that you need a feed reader.
Step 8: Feed Readers
A feed reader is a simple application that keeps a list of all of the feeds you want to track, and uses it to go out to each of those sites and pull in the latest updates. There are many different types of feed readers on the market. Popular ones include Google Reader, News Gater, Net Vibes, and Blog Lines. There are also basic readers in email programs. Programs like Gmail, and Outlook. And they are also in browsers like Safari and Internet Explorer 7. There are also specialized readers like Info Engine offered by my Company, Instant Information that focuses on specific market needs. Each of these readers has different strengths, and I’ll cover some of them in more detail in later episodes.
Step 9: Getting Started
So how do you get started? To do that, let’s take a real-world example. If you’re interested in finance and investing, one of the sites you probably check pretty frequently is a blog called Seeking Alpha. When you go there, you’ll see an RSS icon right at the top of the home page. Clicking on it takes you to a page with an organized list of all the different RSS feeds available from Seeking Alpha. Say you want to get a good financial market overview; you can click on the feed ‘Today’s Market’. It’ll open in the browser, showing you the latest related headlines and a synopsis of each of the stories that are there.
Step 10: Subscribing to feeds
Since I’ve used Internet Explorer 7 in this example, we’ll use it as our RSS reader here as well. At the top of the page is a light yellow box with the name of this feed ‘Seeking Alpha’, some general feed subscription information, and a button at the bottom of the box that says, ‘Subscribe to this feed’. Once you click on that button, you’ll see a pop up window that gives you some options for saving the feed. You can simply click on subscribe and you’re done. It really is that easy. And reading your subscribe feeds is also easy. Just click on the yellow star at the top of IE 7 and click on the feeds tab, and you’ll see a list of every feed you’re subscribed to. When you click on the name of any of the feeds, the latest updates for it will pop right up. We’ve touched on the basics of RSS here, but that only scratches the surface on what you can do with it. There’s a lot more to cover so I hope you’ll be joining me next time on Practical RSS. Thanks for watching.
