Insomnic Dreams

RSS is a way to keep track of websites that update regularly. You subscribe to RSS Feeds that give Really Simple Syndication information to a program that reads those particular feeds. Kind of like a message board or email newsletter format.

This was mostly used for News websites but has since become common for any regularly updating site. The most common way to notice if a site has an RSS feed is to look in the address bar of your browser and you’ll see a little orange icon with a dot and 2 partial circles representing a signal(you should see one for this site). If you are using Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Camino, or any other browsers, you can click on that icon to subscribe to the feed in your default Feed Reader.

A Feed Reader can be any program that can read the simple format of the RSS feeds. Many browsers now have it built in (Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer 7) and you can make the feeds a bookmark and then click on the bookmark to read the feeds. The other way is to use a dedicated program. Some common ones that I recommend are Feedreader on the PC and Vienna on the Mac.

The other options are to use an online reader such as Google Reader, Netvibes, Bloglines or FeedShow, or an email program like Outlook 2007 or Mozilla Thunderbird.

To be honest… RSS is really hard to explain without seeing it. I’ve tried many times with many different levels of tech savviness (yes that is a word). It is easier to just try it and see how it goes.

So, here’s my recommendation for all of you (think of it as homework).

Use whatever program listed above that is already installed on your PC or Mac, or use Google Reader or Bloglines and setup a couple RSS feeds and see how it works. Maybe it’s something you’ll want to try out? Here are a couple RSS feeds to get you started (just copy the links into a new “feed” in whichever program or service you choose):

Insomnic Dream: http://insomnic.wordpress.com/feed/

InterfaceLIFT Wallpapers: http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/rss/index.xml

Ars Technica: http://arstechnica.com/index.ars/rss

BBC World News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml

Applegeeks: http://www.applegeeks.com/rss/

Next time you are on your favorite websites, be sure to check for that RSS icon!

For some more detailed information (and some pictures of the RSS icon and a screenshot of a feed reader) check out the Wikipedia article on RSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

If you get stuck, just open up the Help and do a search for RSS – it should have a basic setup explanation. If you have any questions, feel free to post in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Fun Websites the Easy Way
2. The How-To Geek
3. RSS Video Instruction: In Plain English
4. Tech News