EGLZFAN.com - Random Neural Firings

Some folks find it curious that I love technology so much, yet inexplicably hate email.  Between outright spam and email that’s legit but irrelevant, the amount of “good” email I process is probably something like 2-3%, which is horribly inefficient.  One thing I really liked about email, though, was the concept of an electronic newsletter - specialized content pushed to me whenever there were updates.  I don’t get newsletters anymore, however, thanks to a great innovation called “RSS”.  A friend asked me about RSS earlier today, so I figured a post about it might be in order.

“RSS” stands for “Really Simple Syndication” (or “Rich Site Summary”, there’s a pointless debate about that).  The concept is that a publisher can maintain a “feed” of his own content, and whenever there is new content, the feed updates, and the content is pushed out to everyone who has subscribed to the feed.  The recipients use a piece of software called an “aggregator”, which is basically a glorified, special-purpose web browser, so named because it aggregates multiple feeds.  The net effect is that all the new content from as many sources as you choose is collected in one place so you can browse headlines, read summaries, and then read full articles if you want, whenever you want.

Your first step is to get an aggregator.  If you’ve never done this before, I would recommend a stand-alone aggregator - that way, if you decide you don’t like it, you can just delete it and go on about your business.  There are lots of choices, but I recommend GreatNews because it’s a no-install program (meaning you can run it by just unzipping the directory and running the executable, even from something removable like a USB thumb drive) and it’s FREE.  Download the ZIP file here.

I used GreatNews for a long time, but in the interest of full disclosure I should let ya’ll know I am now using the Sage extension for the Firefox web browser.  It’s a simple, clean interface, and it lives inside Firefox, which is my primary web browser, so it makes navigating back and forth between the web and my feed reader pretty simple.  They’re functional equivalents, though, so use whichever you want.  To use Sage, click here and download Firefox (which you should do anyway if you haven’t already - IE sucks), then go here from within Firefox and click “Install Now” to install Sage.

Anyway, the next thing you need to do is go find feeds for your favorite sites.  They’re everywhere - just go to the sites you visit all the time (especially blogs or news sites, for example) and look for links or little orange boxes that say “RSS” or “XML” (because RSS is in XML).  Those links will be URLs for feeds that your aggregator can download.  Copy those by right-clicking and choosing “Copy Shortcut”, then go into your aggregator, pick “New Channel”, and paste the URL into the appropriate box by clicking in it and pressing Ctrl-V on your keyboard.  Click through the rest of the wizard to finish the job.

Feeds are everywhere, and there are more every day.  I have several from Fox News and from CNN (I like to get both sides), plus blogs for four major Presidential candidates (Clinton, Giuliani, Obama, and Romney - I can’t find McCain’s).  I also have a couple that are football-specific, and a few that are tech-specific.  I have Scott Adams’s blog (the creator of Dilbert) and LifeHacker.  I even subscribed to the Comments feed on this blog, so I get an alert whenever somebody leaves a comment.  The possibilities are almost endless.

If I’m being vague, I apologize - I’m doing this from memory and I’ve always found these programs pretty self-explanatory.  If you need a feed to practice on, there’s one on this blog (the “RSS” link on the right).  Feel free to contact me if you need help, or you can post comments in the questions.