Excessive

I've been trying to think of an easy to understand way to explain what RSS is, why a normal person would use it, and why, and here's what I've come up with (since the RSS wikipedia entry is so horrible at explaining it).

RSS delivers information to you, instead of you having to go around collecting it. For example, most people know what Livejournal is, and most people use what's called their 'Friends' page, which displays all your friends entries on one page, using a format specified by you, so you don't have to sit there for hours going from livejournal to livejournal trying to read them all, find ones are updated, wasting time going to ones that weren't even updated, and then having to deal with ads, bullshit retarded music playing in the background, formatting a human being couldn't even read, etc etc, the friends page gathers the information and presents it in an easy, convenient way. That is exactly what RSS does, but it isn't limited to Livejournal, it can be anything on the internet that offers an RSS feed.

I'm sure most of you have a routine you follow when you get on the computer; you go site to site, seeing what's up and what's new, going to Livejournal, maybe CNN to see if any news broke, video games site to see whats up in gaming, maybe Rollingstone for music news... so the idea behind RSS is that you subscribe to certain websites, and when something new is posted or added, your RSS reader displays it for you, so the information comes to you, instead of you having to go to the information. You no longer have to go to CNN to see if there are any new articles, because when there is a new article posted, your RSS reader will show there is a new article, and even show you the article in a standard format specified by you!

So in other words, RSS Readers are basically the Livejournal friends page of the entire internet! All content will be displayed to you in one place, in a standard format! No more going site to site only to find out some aren't even different!

I guess that leaves another question... What can you use to read RSS feeds? Well, an RSS reader of course, which is an application which collects the articles and displays them for you. Both Firefox and Safari have a built in RSS reader, which grabs the article titles and makes them links, which is the bare minimum... it works, but it's sure not fancy about it. You can get stand-alone applications whos sole purpose is to be an RSS reader, which is what I recommend. You simple drag and drop a feed's link into your app, or use the 'add an RSS feed' function and voila, all the websites you visit will now be readable from your reader, instead of you having to go to the sites.

If you're using a Mac (with OSX), I highly recommend Vienna, a great little app I found, that I'm very impressed with so far. It has some very nice built in styles, and the ability to get new ones, as well as notification of new articles in the dock, and you can even set the window's to be widescreen. If you're on Windows, I'm not really familiar with anything, since back when I had Windows XP, I had never used an RSS reader. I'm sure a quick search in Google for 'RSS reader' will give you some ideas.

One of the things I enjoy the most about RSS feeds, is that you will probably subscribe to more feeds than you probably would've navigated on your own to view. What I mean is, before I would only visit Joystiq for my gaming news, but now that I don't have to do anything to get information, I subscribe to four or five different website's feeds, and get way more information than I would've before, and that goes for political news, music news, and so on. I get so much information now compared to before, that's it's really quite amazing. Most large websites offer an RSS feed (like Slashdot) and you'll never find yourself at a loss of information.

So yes... I probably didn't do the best job at it, and if anyone wants to help me explain RSS feeds to everyone, please by all means e-mail or post a comment. Just remember, it's a gathering of all the information you'd ever want to one place, so you don't have to go site to site trying to find stuff!

Here is a picture of my RSS Reader, Vienna, so you can get an idea of what I mean.

789 words

4 Comments