RSS is the latest "craze" for keeping in touch with what's happening on the Web. If you haven't caught up with it yet, I suggest you spend a bit of time checking it out. There are a million RSS tutorials on the Web, so I am not going to write another one. Instead, I'll give you a brief overview of how RSS can make your life easier.
There is so much stuff on the web that it is impossible to keep up with those bits that interest you. Suppose there are 20 websites, maybe even 200, that carry information that's of interest to you. Does that mean you must visit them all every day or every week to find out if there's something new there? Not if you are using RSS!. In a nutshell, that's what RSS is: An almost automatic way of being notified when something on the web you are interested in changes.
By the way, Internet Explorer 7 uses the term Feeds and FireFox calls it Live Bookmarks.
RSS must be supported by the website you are interested in. Naturally, this blog does so. They both use the RSS icon to signal sites that support RSS. In Internet Explorer 7 the RSS feed icon appears in the tool bar:
In FireFox the icon appears in the address bar (where you type in website addresses):
I happen to use FireFox as my Internet browser. FireFox supports something called add-ins. These are 3rd party enhancements that extend the usefulness of the FireFox browser. IE7 has something similar. In FireFox I am using an add-in called RSS Ticker. Once RSS Ticker is correctly set up, whenever one of the sites I have "Live Bookmarked" changes, I get a scrolling ticker tape message along the bottom of my screen:
This method works very well for someone like me who only wants to monitor a small number of sites. If you end up monitoring ("getting feeds from") a large number of sites, there are other solutions that will work better than a ticker. They all tend to result in a custom built summary page. Some solutions are stand-alone "RSS aggregator" programs. Some are online services like Google Reader.
One of the reasons I switched from an emailed newsletter to a blog is RSS. People are getting sick of floods of email, and a legitimate newsletter will often drown in a sea of spam. A blog you can subscribe to via an RSS feed provides a less intrusive alternative. You can take it or leave it, as you please. That said, I will be using email for quite some while yet to notify you of new blog postings, for the very reason that RSS is yet to be universally adopted. So, why not get on board with RSS to help you stay in touch with what's happening both here at SPLat and all around the web?
