Now, as I said previously, this rate of updates just cannot keep going.
So, I’ve teamed up with Bloglines to give you a handy notifier – all without me having to do anything.
I realise that most people just do not get RSS, because it’s one of those things that you never really hear about. But it is mightily handy for websites you visit that are either updated regularly or fairly rarely.
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.
(Source)
RSS solves a problem for people who are online a lot by getting information from sites you’re interested in and putting them in one handy place. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually, you don’t need to share you email address with everyone under the sun by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter and the number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly.
Now, you do need to have a feed reader normally that does all the work for you by gathering things together, but the reason for using Bloglines is that it’s all done in Internet Explorer, or I assume any other browser you use. There’s a small notifier program to download which pops up a descrete little information balloon whenever your feeds are updated. Very handy.
It would beunfair for me just to mention Bloglines though, so here are some others depending on your system:
- Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac)
- FeedReader (Windows)
- NewsGator (Windows – integrates with Outlook)
There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers along with Bloglines.
Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available and in IE7, there is a button next to the home page one that lights up orange when a feed is available. Really, you have no excuse if you’re a time short web user!
[some links and information via What Is RSS?]
