Drinking from the firehose: using RSS to keep up with the web
Every semester, there’s more and more stuff we’re supposed to read. As more newsletters move to the web to save money on printing, it can be tricky to keep up with everything.
In addition to the usual campus news, I subscribe to about 400 industry blogs. That number boggles some of my colleagues, who inevitably ask, “How do you have time to read all of that?!”
I don’t, of course. And I’m certainly not visiting 400 websites every morning looking for news. Instead, I subscribe to the sites’ RSS feeds. Then I group them by subject matter, skim the headlines, and find the two or three articles every morning that I want to read in full.
What is RSS, and what is it good for?
RSS (“really simple syndication”) is a stripped-down, data-only version of the news on a website. The RSS feed displays only the text — the headline, the story, the date, the byline — without all the formatting and ancillary information that goes into a complete web page.
While RSS has many possible uses, most people use RSS feeds to keep up with websites they read regularly. If you have a long list of bookmarks that you visit every day to see if there’s anything new, you’ll probably find that subscribing to the sites’ RSS feeds would be a faster way to keep up with those sites. An RSS reader (see below) will show you all the new headlines from sites that have been updated since your last visit – only the ones that have been updated. Since the RSS reader is loading only the text of each article rather than the whole website, it can download everything much faster, and display the articles in a standard format that’s easy for you to skim.RSS is also great for sharing information between websites. For example, we use the central university calendar to publicize all our events. Rather than copying all that information by hand onto our own site, we use the RSS feed generated by the calendar system to display the next five events on our home page. TAMUtimes uses RSS feeds from offices around campus to fill in the news for its areas of interest. Google News aggregates RSS feeds from news organizations around the world, sorts them into categories, and displays the stories that are most popular.
(There’s another kind of feed, Atom, that works more or less exactly like RSS. The differences are not very interesting unless you’re a web programmer. For the purposes of this discussion, RSS and Atom feeds are interchangeable.)
How to use RSS
Where to find RSS feeds in Outlook 2010 for Windows
If you use Outlook on Windows, you can read RSS feeds just as you would your email. Look below your Outbox for RSS subscriptions. Outlook for Mac doesn’t include this feature, but there are separate RSS applications that are much easier to use. NetNewsWire and Reeder are popular RSS readers for Macs, iPhones, and iPads. There are lots of other RSS readers for both Windows and Mac, and lots of applications for various smartphones. Just search your app store for “RSS’ and see what appeals to you.
On either operating system, you can also use the free, web-based Google Reader, which is very popular.
How to subscribe to RSS feeds in…
- Outlook 2010 for Windows
- NetNewsWire: click the Subscribe icon in the toolbar (on the far left)
- Google Reader: click the “Add a subscription” button just under the Google logo
Once you find yourself subscribing to a lot of feeds, you’ll want to organize them into folders. Here’s what my web design feeds look like in NetNewsWire. As you can see, it’s easy to skim all the headlines in a folder, mark them all as read using the button in the toolbar, and move on to the next group. If an article catches my attention, I can either read it inside NetNewsWire or open it up in my regular browser.
Folders full of feeds in NetNewsWire
If you manage a website for a course, you can take advantage of RSS’s other purpose: sharing news among websites. Talk to your department’s web designer about using RSS feeds to display headlines or upcoming events from another site. For example, the Writing Center offers feeds for each of our handout categories, our podcasts, and our upcoming events.
Where to find RSS feeds
The standard RSS feed icon
Look for the standard RSS symbol, shown on the right, on the websites you visit. While it’s usually orange, some web designers will change its color to match their own color schemes. Others might incorporate the icon into a larger illustration, but the basic design is usually recognizable. It might be very small, though, so look closely.
Most web browsers show a symbol in the address bar when a site has at least one feed available. However, in more recent versions of Firefox, you’ll have to customize your toolbar to add the feed button. It stays grayed out until you visit a site with a feed, at which point it darkens.
Safari doesn't use the standard symbol, but does put an RSS badge in the address bar when a site has a feed.
In Firefox 6, I had to add the feed button to the toolbar between the address bar and the search box. In previous versions, the standard orange symbol appeared in the address bar next to the star.
Some sites have more than one feed. In that case, pressing one of the browser’s feed buttons will show you a list of all the available feeds. On large sites, you might even find a directory of feeds. For instance, the New York Times provides feeds for each of its blogs, and they’re listed on the blog directory page. Since the Writing Center offers several feeds for different audiences, we’ve created a feed directory as well.
Give it a try
Find an RSS reader you like, subscribe to a few feeds, and tell us what you think! Does this change the way you read the web?
Directory of RSS Feeds