I subscribe to decent amount of RSS feeds. I also have a problem of where I have to check them whenever a new post has come in. I keep a folder on my bookmark bar in safari, so whenever a new feed comes in I get a number up there which makes me check it, I don’t have a choice, I have to. You’ll notice a couple missing, the main one being A List Apart. It was causing problems for a while, everyday it would say there was a new post, but it was just a duplicate of the previous one. I just need to bookmark it again. You’ll also notice that I don’t have ReadWriteWeb, they post too often so I would find myself getting sidetracked from work a lot, so I removed them as well. I also don’t have AuthenticJobs in there, but I do on my home computer. Even though I’m not looking for a job, I like to see what is out there, and I don’t think it would be appropriate on my work computer.

Some feeds post stuff several times a day, some feeds post stuff once a week, or once a month, or sometimes longer. That’s fine with me, those posts once every couple of months usually say something good.

I forget what a lot of these websites look like because I just look at the feed, and the links below are to the feeds. I’m not sure what that would do if you’re on IE6, but whatever, you shouldn’t be on IE6.

So, here are the feeds

subscribe to my feed

I think a lot of us people that use this internet thing a lot, and make things that go on the internets take for granted how real people (yes, I don’t think we’re real) use the internet. We subscribe to feeds, often we publish a feed. I subscribe somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 feeds. I try to limit the number that I subscribe to in order to keep me on task and not waste my day away. The vast majority of the feeds I subscribe to I believe are relevant to my job. The exceptions are The Big Noob and Paste Magazine. I could probably even make the argument that The Big Noob is work related. Not too long ago I had three people ask me about RSS in the same week. That was when I realized that this RSS thing that I have been subscribing to via firefox since sometime in 2005 is still very new to a lot of people.

It’s pretty difficult to find a good solid number that represents the amount of people subscribing to feeds. What I have found probably puts the percentage of internet users somewhere in the 15%-25% neighborhood. I could be way off, but I think that sounds pretty accurate. Honestly, with more and more internet users coming online everyday, the percentage may actually be a little lower. I don’t think anyone truly knows.

So what is RSS?

RSS basically stands for Really Simple Syndication. Many websites, large (like CNN) and small (like this one) publish feeds. See that icon on the right, that’s a link to the feed. If you click on that icon, you’ll see a very bland page without much formatting. This is the feed. It’s actually really just an XML document, depending on your browser you may actually see the XML tags, doubtful though. Most modern browsers, firefox, safari, internet explorer 7 to name a few have built in feed readers, or aggregators. If you book mark this bland page you’ll have a dynamic bookmark, one that updates when the feed is updated. In Safari (and I think most browsers) you have something that tells you when there is a new article. Safari puts a number in parenthesis, which represents the number of articles that are new since you’ve viewed it last. This is pretty handy. There are programs that are made specifically for reading feeds. I’ve tried these but I always come back to Safari, most likely because its an application that I have open 90% of the time for work.

RSS feeds are pretty simple to subscribe to and they’re a great way to stay up to date on the stuff you enjoy reading. What works for me is using a folder on my bookmark bar called RSS, then I put all the bookmarks to feeds in that folder. When something new hits the number shows up in the bar near RSS, then I click there and I see all the bookmarks in the folder, the updated feeds have numbers next to the bookmark name. I move my mouse to the bookmark, click, then I’m at that bland page. Read the article, if you want to see more from the site you can click on the page title at the top, or the article title, then I’m whisked away to that site.

So there you go, RSS explained in a simple manner. My only caution is to be careful, because reading feeds can become an addiction. So go out and start subscribing to blogs, and news, and even Tweets (which is a whole different topic).

subscribe to my feed