How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
- The Talking Heads "Once in a Lifetime"
This Internet thing is pretty spiffy. I like it. Yessir, I like it a lot.
One day though, I found myself asking why I had to type in a dozen URLs every day to visit my daily group of tech, food, and current-event sites (many of which are off to the right on this page in my links). I gave it some thought, and remembered having heard about RSS syndication and publishing.
WHOAH! Acronyms! Big words!!
It's really quite simple, actually. RSS actually stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it IS really simple. Seriously. Yarly.
Here's how it works -
You use an aggregator or news reader, and it pulls the RSS file from your favorite sites and displays a quick summary of the latest stuff on the site for you. Some display the whole site, some just the text, some do a combination - it depends on what you use.
Personally, I use the SAGE plug-in for Firefox, and I love it. It's easily the best RSS aggregator I've tried, and it's incredibly easy to use. Just read the instructions on their site and start using it. You'll wonder how you survived before it.... :)
Relevant links:
The Sage plug-in for the browser. Seriously just go get it. Today.
The Firefox browser. If you're using IE still, I'm going to slap you silly.
If you REALLY need to learn about the inner workings of RSS, go for it.
Posts
The irony here is that while I dig on RSS and use Google's aggregator, I can't seem to find a feed for your blog anywhere on your page.
ReplyDeleteThe RSS link is available via the little symbol in your address bar on the right, where normally you'd type in an address - in Firefox, anyway. :) I'll look it up for adding a link for IE users.
ReplyDeleteI'm aware of the Live Bookmark thingy, but Google-reader doesn't use an extension (part of it's appeal) and therefore can't pickup on the Live-bookmark link. And I'll thank you to never again imply that I use IE [spit!].
ReplyDelete