If you haven’t noticed yet, blogUT’s got a RSS feed. By now you’ve probably heard of RSS, and are possibly using it. If you aren’t, it’s a good time to get with the times.

It’s a very useful tool for checking a large number frequently updated websites. There is no consensus as to quite what RSS stands for, but the most common definition seems to be “really simple syndication” which happens to be a good summary of what it is.

In essence RSS is a low bandwidth(XML-based) format in which websites can publish their content. That this format is low bandwidth is rather important as this allows websites to publish information about their content at a fraction of the cost of loading the entire webpage.

This allows users to check if a webpage has updated without loading the actual webpage. The upshot of this is that the user can do this much faster, and it uses much less of the websites bandwidth.

But how does one use RSS? Well, all of the major browsers now natively support most versions of RSS as well as most versions of Atom (another format used for the same purpose). If you use Firefox or IE you should see the following icon whenever a webpage supports RSS. In Firefox it will be to the right of the url, while in IE it should be to the right of the homepage icon. Clicking on this in Firefox will give you the option of creating a “live bookmark” which essentially creates an auto-updating bookmark folder that lists the titles of the last several posts to that website. In IE it takes you to the feed page, from where you can subscribe to the feed. Having done this you can click on the star in the top left right above the webpage. This will then list your feeds and tell you how many posts, if any, have been made since the last time you were at the webpage.

Note that RSS feeds are also sometimes denoted with the following icons:

You might want more functionality than what your browser provides, or maybe even just a different functionality. This is easy to accomplish as there are scores of other RSS readers out there. If you use Thunderbird to manage email, than you’ll be pleased to know that Thunderbird also has native support for RSS feeds, and essentially treats them as it would newgroups.

A decent list of RSS aggregators can be found here.This is smaller than mosts lists you’ll find, but at the same time there should be more than enough RSS readers here for you to find one that suits you.

There’s also an array of online RSS aggregators. These have the advantage that you can access them anywhere you go. TechCrunch reviews a list of online RSS aggregators here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 1:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.