RSS
I am a geek, I know that. So many times I will talk about something and not realize that people might not know what I am talking about. So what I am going to do is put this in nongeek terms for those of you know don’t know. I’m not talking down or anything like that. Just trying to close the gap between geek and everyone else.
RSS is a programming language. Programmers use this language for web pages that get updated constantly. This is part of the reason why blogs have become so popular. By putting the most recent update at the top of the page, it makes it easier for people to see what has been done since the last time they were on the site quickly so that they can go on to surfing other sites. On most blogs, there is a little link that says RSS, Subscribe to this site, or something similar. This makes it easy for people who use RSS to subscribe with a single click.
Firefox, my favorite browser, incorporates RSS into the browser unlike Internet Explorer that doesn’t know how to interpret RSS other than as text. Now, what does that mean to you? Well, you can subscribe to sites and not actually have to go there to see if anything has changed. Here is a screenshot of the bulit in RSS reader in Firefox
Just click on it and check out the picture. As you can see, I have a little orange icon next to the tab that I have open on the bookmarks. This shows that there is an RSS feed for that site. In Firefox, when you navigate from page to page, if this is available, then it will have a little icon on the lower right of your screen that is orange and you can subscribe. But this is a little screenshots of the ones that I check constantly. This way I can look and see if I have read the most recent item, because it is at the top of the list and it is easy to navigate through. Most news sites now use RSS for distribution as well so that you can see what happened in the last hour instead of what happened 2 weeks ago.
Now, RSS isn’t just limited to text. RSS actually works with audio, video, images and everything in between. That is how Podcasts work. There are RSS feeds for audio that you can subscribe to through a client called a podcatcher like iPodder and iPodderX. These download podcasts on a consistent basis in the background as long as your computer is running.
Now, even My Yahoo has an RSS reader built into it. So you can subscribe to an RSS feed through their site and just go to the My Yahoo page and check out if things have changed since you last checked.
Well, I may have just made it as plain as mud, but I hope it helped a little bit. If you don’t quite get it, just leave a comment and I will explain it, at least as far as my knowledge extends. If you want to read another article about it. ABC News has a good article about RSS. You can check that out here.