When I want to relax I sift through my favourite webpage bookmarks. Since I have so many, this often takes up most of my day. If only I had bothered to learn about RSS or Atom earlier, I could have saved myself hours.
RSS, Really Simple Syndication is a form of web syndication used by news websites and weblogs. What this means is if you have a feeds reader you can subscribe to these websites and get updates only when they have fresh material. So instead of checking your 10 favourite blogs, news sources and other sites every day, you just need to check one place that displays the headlines and summaries from those sites. It does the work of finding when the sites are updated, organizes the headlines and rids you of read articles.
So instead of waking up to a newspaper everyday, I wake up to my electronic newspaper with its personalized sections: gaming, celebrity, gadgets and news.
If you want a desktop program, I recommend
Abilon.
If you prefer a web application you can use the simple
Google Reader or the more robust
Bloglines.
Google reader and Bloglines have search tools to find the RSS or Atom addresses, but if you use Abilon you can use the
RSS Micro search engine to find the feeds.
I'm all grown up. I have a feed here:
.
Go to
Feed Burner if you want to hop on the wagon and syndicate your blog. It gives instructions on how to syndicate for most popular blog publishing sites.
As I was typing this post, I found an amazing reader. It features a two panel view that neatly lines up posts into two columns allowing you to preview more efficiently. It also seems speedier, and It lets me quickly blog a story to blogger.com or even my desktop blogging software, w.bloggar (I'll be posting a lot more links from now on). One last feature is the ease of adding sites to the program, just enter the url into the address bar and if it has a feed, it will show up as an orange RSS button on the bottom right.
The program is called
GreatNews .
