What is RSS?

by Mervyn Love

If you’re reading this, then the chances are you don’t know - what RSS is I mean, and you want to find out more.  Good for you, because RSS has changed the way we get the information we actually want to arrive on our desktop as opposed to wading through mountains of spam in our in-box.

RSS stand for Rich Site Summary (or Really Simple Syndication depending on who you’re talking to) and works by delivering to your computer a brief summary of items that you have decided you want to receive. If one of those is of interest, you can click on its link and this will usually take you to further information. In some cases the ‘summary’ can be the whole article. Another word we will come across in the RSS context is Weblog, often abbreviated to Blog.

Take for instance the RSS ‘feeds’, as they’re called, on WritersReign.co.uk. One of these is for competitions. So instead of needing to visit the site every week or two to see what’s new, you can opt to receive an RSS feed which will give you the latest competitions that have been posted to the site. This will be delivered to your inbox when you next go online after I have updated the feed on WritersReign. Naturally I shall miss not having you visit the site, but I hope you will recognise that there is a great deal of other good stuff here and you’ll continue to call in from time to time.

SO HOW DOES THIS ALL HAPPEN?

There are three ways you can access RSS information:

The Browser Route

For most people this will be the simplest method. You need to find one of the several web sites that provide this service, but to get you started and to keep things simple I’m only going to take you to one site, which is free. Here’s what you do:

• In the Address box of your browser type: www.bloglines.com/ or click this link.
• On the Bloglines home page, in the middle of the screen, click on “Sign Up Now, It’s Free!”
• Fill in your e-mail address, choose a password, choose your time zone from the drop-down box, choose your Language and then click on the ‘Register’ button at the bottom.
• Bloglines will send you an instant confirmation e-mail which you must reply to and you’re in business. Clicking on the link in the e-mail will take you back to a Bloglines page where you are invited to select from a limited number of RSS feeds to get you started. For us writers there is one called ‘Bookworm’ which will do to experiment with, so why not click the check-box for that? Go ahead and choose any others that take your fancy, but just a word of caution: don’t take on too many at this stage. Then click on the ‘Subscribe to My Selections’ button at the bottom right of the screen.

Now comes the exciting part. After clicking the Subscribe button you are taken to your personal Bloglines page.

In the left-hand column you will see a list of the RSS feeds you subscribed to. Each one is followed by a number telling you how many items each feed, or channel as they are somewhat confusingly called, awaits your pleasure.
Click on one of the feeds and the right-hand window will fill with the items for you to review.

WARNING!

Take a look to the right of each summary in the right-hand pane. There you will see a check box labelled ‘Keep New’. If you find an item you like the look of, but don’t have time to check it out right now, check that box. Otherwise if you leave that feed and come back to it in a few minutes time, you will find that Bloglines has cleared all the items away and you can’t get to any that you would have liked to visit.

Each item usually has a headline followed by a brief summary of what the article is about. If you click on the headline you will be taken to the whole article. Simple really, isn’t it?

In the case of the Competition feeds on the WritersReign site, I give you all the details you need to follow up a given competition without having to visit the site. Which is really very good of me, you have to admit! But if you click on the headline it will take you to the Competition Page where you can see all the competitions I currently have posted, not just the new ones in the feed.

Where to Next?

So having spent many happy minutes checking out the items in your chosen feeds, where do you go next? Take a look at the top of the page and to the right. You will see a search box. Here you can put in any subject you are interested in and find further feeds to subscribe to.

Bookmark Bloglines!

Yes, it’s obvious, I know, but when you’ve forgotten to bookmark as many sites as I have you need this reminder.

Now, every time you go onto the internet, pay a visit to Bloglines and see what new items have been delivered to your page.

The Software Route

Many people find using a software reader or ‘aggregator’ (another confusing word so beloved by the internet geeks) preferable to using a browser. If you’re someone who falls into that category then this section is for you.

Again, I’m going to take one piece of software to use as an example, but there are many more of them out there. Just do a Google search on ‘RSS reader’ and see what you get.

The program I’m happy with is FeedDemon - www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/   You can download a 30-day trial to see what it’s like, then buy it if you like it. It’s not too expensive.

So let’s take FeedDemon as our example. I’ll assume you have downloaded the trial version and installed it.

When you fire it up you will see there are three panes. The left-hand pane is where your list of feeds, or channels, is displayed, but you can also group them by subject if you wish. Something you can’t do (yet) with Bloglines.

When you click on one of the feed titles the current list of items is displayed in the middle pane. Of course, you need to be connected to the Internet to collect new feeds.

When you choose one of the feeds you like, a fuller summary is displayed in the right-hand pane. Click on the headline in the right-hand pane and that pane is transformed into a browser window and takes you to the article or web page directly.

There is much more functionality to FeedDemon that I can’t go into here, but do explore the program and see what it can do for you.

Where Do I Get New Feeds?

There are two ways to get new feeds to add to your reader or Bloglines page.

• By searching for them. As we’ve already seen Bloglines provides an excellent selection of subjects to choose from by using its search facility. Other sites like Bloglines have their own databases of topics which may differ from Bloglines.
• Enter a search term in the search box and click on the Go arrow. I tried the word ‘knitting’ thinking this would bring up a few manageable links (if any, actually) to use as examples. In fact Bloglines found over 7,000 feeds on this subject. Who said the art of knitting was dead?!
• Now, against each entry there are underlined choices for ‘Preview’, ‘Related Feeds’ and ‘Subscribe’. Take a peek with the preview link, then come back and subscribe if wish to.
• By finding an RSS link or button on a site you are visiting. An RSS button may look like this:   You will also find buttons with 'XML' on and a wide variety of other methods for obtaining feeds.
• However, beware! You may naturally think that clicking on the button takes you to the feed. But, Oh, no! What you have to do is RIGHT-click the button, then, from the pop-up menu, choose ‘Save target as’ Why? Because, behind that little box is the URL of the feed – BUT the feed is in a language called XML which Bloglines and FeedDemon and their counterparts can convert into a readable page, but which your browser cannot. So why not give it a try right now? Right-click on the RSS box above, choose ‘Save as target’ from the pop-up menu, (or, if you’re reading this article from a PDF document, choose ‘Copy Link Location’) then paste it into your Bloglines or FeedDemon as described below.
• Having put the URL onto the clipboard by choosing ‘Save target as’, you now go over to Bloglines or FeedDemon and enter it as a feed you want to subscribe to. This is how you do that:
• Bloglines. In the left-hand column near the top are underlined choices for Add, Edit, Reorder/Sort and Options. Choose Add. The right-hand pane will then display several boxes, the top one being labelled: ‘Blog or feed URL’. This is the one you want. Click your curser into it and paste (Ctl+V) the URL into it. Click on the Subscribe button on the right of the box and hey presto! You’ve done it!
• FeedDemon. Over the middle pane is an icon labelled ‘New Channel’. Click on this and a window opens up with three choices, the first one of which declares ‘I will enter the URL of the feed’ Click the radio button to select this option and click ‘Next’. In the resulting window paste in the URL held in the clipboard. (FeedDemon may already have filled it in) and click  the ‘Next’ button.
• If you get a message at this point saying the URL could not be auto-discovered, then there is something wrong with the link URL and there is not much you can do, other than e-mail the webmaster with the problem.
• On the next page enter a title and choose a channel group. Click ‘Next’, and on the next page ‘Finish’. Your new feed is all set up to pull in articles or information.

The E-mail Route

Since writing the above Microsoft Outlook has got its act together and built in an RSS capture feature into recent releases. This also applies to some other e-mail client providers. So check your Outlook's help file and see if you are up-to-date. If so follow the directions to get Outlook et al to automatically collect your RSS feeds for you.

CONCLUSION

I hope this article has inspired you to start using RSS feeds and has given sufficient information to get you up and running with them. If you think there are aspects of the subject I haven’t covered, or if you have any questions, then please email me: 

As I said at the beginning, RSS has taken off as a means of getting you the information you really want. It is advert free, spam free and virus free, which can’t be bad. Having said that, who knows what the devious spammers will get up to in future. But for now, it’s clean - so take advantage of it.