Carnal Reason

The Christmas season is upon us, and posting is (and will continue to be) light. So what is the dear reader jonesing for that next hit of CR goodness to do? The answer is RSS.

A reader wrote in an unpublished comment:

hey good blog but ..dont u have rss feeds ?

I’m not entirely convinced that particular comment was not some sort of spam effort, but it serves my purpose of the moment. Yes, I do have an RSS feed, here.

So what is RSS? If you really care, google can tell you in excruciating detail. A better question is what can RSS do for you? The answer is it can provide a convenient way to follow lots of blogs with a minimum of fuss and bother.

Here is the hard way to follow many sites. Keep a bunch of bookmarks, one per site. To see whether there is anything new at say, Florida Cracker, you click the Florida Cracker bookmark and actually visit the site. Then site by site, you visit the various sites you want to read. It can be frustrating. You ask yourself, what is that demented slacker at Carnal Reason ranting about now? You come out here, only to learn the answer is nothing. That slacker hasn’t posted in days, and you just wasted several precious seconds instead of the several more you would have wasted had I posted.

Here is what RSS can do for you. Instead of you going to a bunch of sites, you subscribe to the sites. Your RSS reader checks for you to see which ones have new stuff, and you never have to bother going to sites which have not been updated since your last visit.

The careful reader will have noticed that you need a tool, an RSS reader, to get in on this action. There are a bunch of ways to go here. The RSS reader market is very competitive, with both free and pay resources. I will mention only a few.

If you are on Windows, a friend whose judgement I trust tells me that Feed Demon is the way to go. It is a commercial product, but it comes with a trial period which would enable you to test the RSS waters. For my own Windows RSS usage I go with Sage, a free plugin to Firefox. The Sage/Firefox combo is actually a pretty good cross platform solution.

The Mac has a number of good RSS readers. Safari has one built in, but I am not a fan. I like the free NetNewsWire Lite, but I actually use the free and open source Vienna as my RSS reader of choice.

Just as there are web based email clients, say gmail, there are web based RSS readers, such as Google Reader.

Just to try to make things a bit more concrete for someone who hasn’t used an RSS reader, below is a scree shot of Vienna. I know, you don’t use a Mac, but go with it. Most RSS readers look a lot like this due to convergent evolution.

On the lefmost panel you see some of my subscriptions; they don’t all fit on one page. The number to the right of some subscriptions indicates the number of unread articles. Highlighted in grey on the left is a logical view called unread articles. The top right panel give the title and source of the unread articles. Highlighted in yellow is one from Slashdot, which is previewed in the lower right panel. There are many user conveniences, say opening articles in a browser, flagging articles for later reference, keyboard navigation, and others.

If you are spending much time on the web and are not yet using an RSS reader, do yourself a favor and check it out. Try a few different readers, find one that suits your style. You’ll be able to read what you want to read in much less time, and also be able to follow irregularly updated sites (ahem) with no wasted trips.

Posted on December 17th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: blogging