OK. So now we’ve got a nifty new resource for disseminating tech-knowledge-y: This weblog. But MAN! what a hassle it’ll be to have to check yet another spot in addition to the logs and the emails and the voicemail, etc. Luckily it doesn’t have to be a chore to stay current with the tech blogginess thanks to a technology called RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication which is really just a means to keep tabs on websites whose content changes regularly such as news sites, or BLOGS!
This RSS technology is now so widely used that all browsers have the capability to read these streams of content built into them. For example, if you are browsing this site in the Firefox or Safari browsers you might see an icon like the one pictured up in the location bar. That indicates that the site you are visiting has an RSS “feed” you can subscribe to. In these browsers you can click on this icon when it appears in your location (like right now) and the browser will ask you where you’d like to place the bookmark. I’d recommend putting the bookmark in your “bookmarks toolbar folder” so that you can always see the bookmark. Now you have a dynamic bookmark in your browsers toolbar which will periodically check this site and update itself with any new content that gets posted here. Very convenient!
The bookmark trick is just one of many ways to read these content feeds. There are a couple really nice web-based RSS readers, or aggregators, as they are sometimes called. If you have an account with the Google then you might be interested in Google’s Reader. Another one i’ve used and liked is Bloglines. The reader simply culls all your RSS feeds into one place and lets you sift through them all on one central site. Plus, the advantage of these services being web-based is that your RSS content is available from any internet-capable computer.
There are LOTS (millions) of these streams of content freely available for the taking on the interwebs. In the sidebar of this site, under “The Associates” I’ve listed a few of my favorite RSS feeds that i check on a regular basis. Most of them are geeky, but all of them are interesting. Hopefully the implications of this technology are apparent to you, whether you are a sports-news-junky, or an NPR-junky, or an Onion-junky, there is now a new and extremely quick and simple way for you to keep track of the stuff YOU care about.
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