RSS for Everyone
3 December 2007
The need for syndication
There are lots of websites that have regularly updated content, including news sites and online newspapers, blogs (online columns such as this one), podcasts (online audio shows), forums (online discussions) and many other types of website.
How do you find out about updates? One way is to manually surf around your favourite sites everyday to see if there have been any updates that interest you.
However, this is quite an inefficient use of your time. What if your computer could automatically inform you when your favourite sites publish new content? What if your computer maintained a list of these updates, so you could look in one place and see what interests you today?
Enter RSS
This is one of the main things that RSS is used for. RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". RSS is a way for your computer to automatically check for updates on websites you are interested in.
More specifically, many websites have a special type of hyperlink called an 'RSS feed'; you copy this hyperlink and give it to a specialised program called an 'RSS Reader' which then does the rest.
The diagram below shows my RSS Reader. On the left hand column is a list of my favourite websites; if I select one then the latest updates appear in the top-right box. I can then select an update which appears in the bottom-right box.
You can see that in the bottom right box, the title of the post is in bright blue, as you might expect, that is a hyperlink. If I click on a hyperlink then it will open in my normal web browser.
You can also see that in the list of websites found in the left hand column, some websites are in bold, these have unread updates.
That is the basics, RSS Readers often have more advanced features, such as categories, or reading the new updates altogether in one stream.
How to spot an RSS feed
RSS is the most popular format of syndication feed, but there are a few variations with different names and minor differences in the format. As a consumer of the feeds, you do not need to care about the minor technical differences, your RSS reader will hide all that from you. The important thing is that you are able to spot the syndication feeds on your favourite websites.
So because this may seem complicated, let me try to summarise it. Many websites have syndication feeds, which may be in various (very similar) formats that have different names, but you just treat them all the same.
In practical terms, somewhere on the website, normally around the edge of the page somewhere, will be a link to the syndication feed.
It may be clearer if we take some examples, I have taken screenshots from the corners of a few webpages. Firstly, the following three sites have plain text links. For each image, try to spot the word 'RSS':
You may have noticed that the image of the left has the word 'ATOM'. ATOM is just a posh RSS feed format that was standardised by the great and good, treat it exactly the same as an RSS feed. The following webpage has image links for both:
Sometimes you will see the term RSS, sometimes ATOM, sometimes both. They both are XML based formats, so sometimes you will see the term XML, as in the following image, this is just an RSS feed, treat it as normal.
For some reason, orange has become the universal colour of syndication feeds. There is also a radio wave symbol that was first introduced in Mozilla Firefox, but it has since become a de facto standard. The following website uses it:
Available RSS Readers
So we have seen why we want to use RSS, we have looked into how a typical RSS reader is used, and we have looked into how to spot the feeds on the websites that we visit. The last step is to go and get an RSS reader and start using it. Below I list various RSS readers by Operating System (if you don't know what you have then you have Windows).
An RSS reader is a simple piece of software - it does not have the complexity of a Mars Lander! So don't waste too much time choosing between them, the first one that works for you is the correct one.
Linux
There are quite a lot of RSS readers for Linux, so I will just pick out a handful that I know about already. On the Command Line, Snownews is the leading ncurses based reader.
I use the GNOME's project's Straw. At my local Python user group, I noticed a friend of mine using Liferea, which looks pretty much identical to Straw. Akregator is an RSS reader for KDE. All of these are available from your friendly neighbourhood package manager.
Cross-Platform Mozilla-based RSS Readers
Mozilla-based software works on Linux, the Mac and on Windows. Mozilla Thunderbird has a built in RSS reader, and there are (at least) two Firefox extensions Sage and Wizz.
Windows
Apart from the Mozilla-based ones above, there are many RSS readers for Windows including RSS Bandit and RSS Owl.
Mac OS X
On the Mac, one easy place to start would be Safari's built in RSS support, since you have that already. In the longer run, Vienna is a more fully featured option.
Conclusion
Hopefully that is enough for you to understand and use RSS feeds to keep up with your favourite sites. Of course, please remember to add my feed! Happy syndicating!
Links to further information
1 dbr says...
To simplify RSS, a good analogy is to compare it to an email client, but for news. Most people are familiar with email clients, and the concept behind them. The same can be applied to RSS readers. Imagine each RSS feed is the company emailing you new content, and those emails automatically go into the websites folder. It sounds just like a newsletter, and it kind of is - but it's generally much more regular (because RSS is automated, it doesn't rely on someone remembering to write new newsletters every week/month) And, a good selling point I'd imagine - you don't have to give your email (or any other personal information for that matter) to the company, so you're not going to get any spam emails from them.
As for RSS readers themselves - RSS Owl is cross-platform (being based on Firefox if I recall right). On OS X, Leopards version of "Mail" has a usable RSS reader, and it functions pretty much identically to regular emails (it's just like Thunderbirds RSS I suppose, although included with the OS). NetNewsWire is a fairly popular OS X RSS reader, there's a paid-for version that costs $30 or something, and NetNewsWire Lite which is has a few less features, although personally I'd just use the free and non-cut-down Vienna..
And, by far my favourite reader is "Google Reader", which is the only RSS reader I've used that can display the full articles in a page, and let you flick though them with keyboard shortcuts, marking items as read only when they are selected. There's a similar "Unified" view in Vienna, but as soon as you click a feed, it marks everything as read, even if there is hundreds of items I never actually see. It's a web-based one, but it does have an "offline" mode using a Firefox/Internet Explorer plugin. I find it's pretty much the only reader I like with more than a few RSS feeds - I use Google Reader with a ridiculous amount of feeds (Around about 100-200 I think..), and can easily "process" a few hundred articles in 20 minutes or so, where as with Mail's RSS reading, I only have about 5 "important" feeds, and even looking though 10 articles a day is slow.
..anyway, better post this message before this wireless connection stop responding again - Ben
Posted at 5:41 a.m. on December 3, 2007
2 dbr says...
To simplify RSS, a good analogy is to compare it to an email client, but for news. Most people are familiar with email clients, and the concept behind them. The same can be applied to RSS readers. Imagine each RSS feed is the company emailing you new content, and those emails automatically go into the websites folder. It sounds just like a newsletter, and it kind of is - but it's generally much more regular (because RSS is automated, it doesn't rely on someone remembering to write new newsletters every week/month) And, a good selling point I'd imagine - you don't have to give your email (or any other personal information for that matter) to the company, so you're not going to get any spam emails from them.
As for RSS readers themselves - RSS Owl is cross-platform (being based on Firefox if I recall right). On OS X, Leopards version of "Mail" has a usable RSS reader, and it functions pretty much identically to regular emails (it's just like Thunderbirds RSS I suppose, although included with the OS). NetNewsWire is a fairly popular OS X RSS reader, there's a paid-for version that costs $30 or something, and NetNewsWire Lite which is has a few less features, although personally I'd just use the free and non-cut-down Vienna..
And, by far my favourite reader is "Google Reader", which is the only RSS reader I've used that can display the full articles in a page, and let you flick though them with keyboard shortcuts, marking items as read only when they are selected. There's a similar "Unified" view in Vienna, but as soon as you click a feed, it marks everything as read, even if there is hundreds of items I never actually see. It's a web-based one, but it does have an "offline" mode using a Firefox/Internet Explorer plugin. I find it's pretty much the only reader I like with more than a few RSS feeds - I use Google Reader with a ridiculous amount of feeds (Around about 100-200 I think..), and can easily "process" a few hundred articles in 20 minutes or so, where as with Mail's RSS reading, I only have about 5 "important" feeds, and even looking though 10 articles a day is slow.
..anyway, better post this message before this wireless connection stop responding again - Ben
Posted at 5:41 a.m. on December 3, 2007
3 jesse says...
I constantly monitor about 280 feeds via my irc bots. RSS freakin changed my life. Any page not serving feeds is just lame and usually not worth visiting.
Posted at 6:15 a.m. on December 3, 2007
4 Bug says...
Haha. The green arrow points to the space after my Webbie :). Just under "Bash cures cancer".
Thats a new meaning: "Rich Site Summary", Though I believe RSS is really: "Really Short Summary".
But yeah, if it wasn't for RSS, I would have visited WAY less websites. Being able to just know if a website got updated saves a lot of time :). Heck, I can even know if it got updated with something I want to read, even more time saving!
Posted at 8:05 a.m. on December 3, 2007
5 Phill says...
One thing which web pages can do is notify the web browser that there is an RSS feed available using a link rel="alternate" tag.
In Firefox, this means that you get a nice feed icon up in the address bar, letting you know that the site has a feed to subscribe to. It's really handy!
Posted at 9:24 a.m. on December 3, 2007
6 Luke says...
I use and like Raggle, which is another console rss reader.
http://www.raggle.org/about/
Posted at 12:57 p.m. on December 6, 2007
7 Justin says...
I'm glad to see that you subscribe to my feed :).
RSS has ruined my life... every day when I get home I have about 200 things to read and I have to stay on top of it or I'll never get done reading. Maybe it isn't such a good idea to have digg in my reader... what am I thinking of course it is a good idea. But really rss is the best thing to hit the internet in a very long time.
Ok bye.
Posted at 3:31 a.m. on December 7, 2007