"To be clever enough to get a great deal of money, one must be stupid enough to want it"What is RSS and how do I use it?
I’m a big fan of RSS and it shocks me that the majority of my friends and family don’t know what this is or use it. Hopefully this post will explain what RSS is and how to use it. Let’s look at the wikipedia definition first:
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.
Doesn’t make sense? Watch the movie about ‘RSS in plain english’:
So far the best explanation on the web about what RSS is and how to use it. Let’s talk about the RSS Readers.
RSS Readers
As you could see in the video you need a RSS Reader to ‘read’ your feeds. There are two type of RSS readers, the web-based readers and the desktop readers. It’s all up to you which one you want to use. Myself I use the desktop reader Newsfire. Here’s a list with RSS readers (Mac):
Snackr
Lat night I stumbled upon a new kind of RSS reader. It’s a ticker running on the bottom (or top, left, right of your screen, depending on your settings) of your screen.
What’s Snackr? It’s an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. When you see a title that looks interesting, you can click on it to pop up the item in a window.
What’s this AIR thing? Snackr was built using Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0. AIR makes it really easy to build cross-platform desktop apps using web technologies like AJAX, Flash and Flex. The Adobe AIR runtime will be installed when you install Snackr.
Let me know what kind of RSS reader you are using if any!
