RSS Revealed

Before you get scared off, or more likely, assume this is another boring techie post, you should read this post and try RSS. I’ll try and keep it short and sweet, but stick with me and it will be worth it.

So here’s the problem: You’ve got a few websites which you check periodically, like this one. But you either forget to check it and miss the latest news, or you check it repeatedly only to be disappointed that there wasn’t anything new. So what do you do?

Well one solution you might come up with is to have the people running the websites you watch set up their websites to let you sign up to get emails when new things are posted. Well it is possible and that may sound appealing but there are problems with that. One problem is that website updates would just clutter up your email, which if you are like me is already cluttered enough. The other problem is that you are making someone else responsible for what you want, which means you don’t have control over it. So the websites would end up ‘pushing’ the information to you and you can’t control when and how much gets pushed. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a solution where websites would publish what is new and you could collect or ‘pull’ the information? Well, lucky for you, we’ve got RSS.

RSS, or Real Simple Syndication, is a type of web ‘feed’ commonly generated by web sites like blogs or news sites. You don’t need to worry about the specifics, just that it is a common format accepted by the web community and provided by most major web sites and blogging software. An RSS feed is generally a title with a summary or the first part of the post, which provides a link that you can follow if you want to read more. So all these websites publish feeds which tell you what is new and give you a summary. Now all you have to do is pick a way to go and gather all of the feeds that you are interested in. So this goes back to RSS being a pull, where you pick which feeds you check, how often, and how many updates you show. The thing that goes and checks the feeds is called an aggregator. It can go and check all of the feeds for you ahead of time, like every hour or every day, so that when you go to look at it, all the updates are there waiting for you.

So what aggregator is best? Well, that is a more complicated question. First let’s look at the main types of aggregators. The first type of aggregator is a desktop aggregator. It is a piece of software that runs on your computer and works much like an email program like Outlook which checks your email account for new mail. Desktop aggregators ideally give you a really nice interface with lots of options like grouping feeds into categories, like news and family. It also has features to help you manage which feeds you have read and which ones are new.

The next category is on-line aggregators. Basically a web page which displays your feed and is hosted somewhere on the web so you can access it from anywhere. Typically these don’t have as many options as a desktop aggregator.

The last category is email aggregators which send the updates to you over email. When I first started using RSS I thought this would be the way to go. Turns out, I quickly changed my mind. The things you subscribe to over RSS are typically things that you like to read but if you miss a day or week you just want the most current. Also, some feeds have a lot of updates that quickly clutter your important email with updates about what I did last weekend, for example. So I came to the conclusion that email and RSS feeds are by their purpose very different things. I subscribe to RSS feeds for news sites like CNN which might have 100 stories a day, but after scanning through the headlines and summaries, I might only read 10%.

OK, so what aggregator do I recommend? Well, I’ll give you two of my picks for two different scenarios. If you are adventurous and regularly browse numerous websites for news and other interests then I suggest you try a desktop aggregator like RSS Bandit. It’s an open-source project from sourceforge.net which you may have noticed is a common theme of my recommend free software. I use it at work and like it.

For the less adventurous, I’d recommend setting up a personalized Google homepage. It’s an interesting twist on an on-line aggregator. It’s a homepage that you can have set as your browser’s homepage, or just when you visit Google, which lets you set up feeds to display on the page. If you take a look at the link above it will give you an idea of what it looks like. It works well for subscribing to sites that don’t update very often, like personal blogs, since it works best to only show about 3 entries for each site. It also lets you show things like your Gmail and the weather. We have that as our homepage on our computer at home. It is also a good solution for people who share a computer since it wouldn’t work well for Jenny and I both to use RSS Bandit on the same computer as the same user because it marks items as read after one person’s looked at them.

There are lots of different aggregators out there and I haven’t done an extensive review of them but that is at least what I use. So what feeds should you subscribe to and how can you tell a site has feeds? Usually the site will have an icon like the one above or one that says "XML". Also, aggregators can usually find feeds if you point them to the page. Our site has multiple feeds to give you options. It has a feed for posts, for comments, and then feeds for the photo albums. The feeds are generated automatically by the software on our server.

RSS and earlier relatives, have been around for awhile and are going to be here to stay. The next version of Internet Explorer will have built-in support for RSS feeds so that they look and feel like your Favorites, but show the updates dynamically. Firefox already supports that as what it calls "Live Bookmarks". So I’d anticipate more popularity of RSS once IE 7 comes out.

So the next time you ask me if I’ve updated the website or when I’m going to post new pictures, be ready to answer the question of why you aren’t using RSS!

French Fries and Tux Troubles

Last week Jenny and I watched the movie Super Size Me, which is a documentary about a guy who ate only McDonald’s for 30 days. I don’t think anyone would argue that eating only fast food is a bad idea, but it’s an interesting and entertaining movie. It’s also a interesting look at personal responsibility versus corporate responsibility.

That got me thinking about what I could try for 30 days. A couple of weeks ago I was ‘accosted’ by several Mac fanatics at work and they were trying to convince me that a Mac is the best solution for a typical home user. I’m still not convinced, and I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced. Like it or not, Windows has the vast majority of market share which means that most things geared toward typical home users are predominantly Windows. It would be pretty hard to change my recommendation from Windows to something else that I have to pay for. Give me something free and easy to use and then we’ll talk. That’s where Linux comes into play. Follow the link for info on what Linux is but it is an operating system like Windows and Mac, only it is free and open source (btw, Tux the penguin is the official mascot of Linux). The problem has been that Linux hasn’t been as user-friendly as Windows and Mac so it has only been used by techies.

Well, I had recently heard of a distribution of Linux, Ubuntu, that was very user friendly. So I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to try it. And what better way to really evaluate Linux than to use it exclusively for 30 days. Well, OK, I have to use Windows at work, but I was committed to using Linux exclusively at home for 30 days, trying to use it for all of the common tasks of a typical home user. Jenny wasn’t so keen on joining me, but said I could do it on the laptop and leave her the desktop.

So I burned a Live CD, which allows you to boot into Linux and try it out without having to install it, and booted my laptop into Linux. I was impressed! Everything just worked and the live CD was able to find and use all my hardware, even my built in wireless Ethernet. That was pretty impressive to me since most laptops require specialized hardware drivers and I didn’t know if trying Linux on a laptop would really be a fair test. After being impressed I ran the Linux installer and things took a turn for the worse. The installer was easy to use but when it went to install, it hung. Some troubleshooting determined that the partitions on the hard drive that it created were not correct. Long story short, I spent 3 nights trying to get it installed and never succeeded. I even made my own partitions with Partition Magic. After 3 nights of trying, I decided that Linux probably wasn’t going to be able to make the grade on the tests I had planned to able to be used by a typical home user. I was disappointed, but rather than spend more time on that project I decided to scrap it and work on something more useful.

But all this has made me hungry. I think I’ll run to McDonald’s for some fries.