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Toying for first time with RSS. anyone give me idiot guide - what' s it good for? I have subscribed to GBF RSS in Outlook 2010 and as far as I can see I'm offered in email form just the original post in every new thread. So far, it's much preferrable to view GBF by clicking the refresh button in Ffox, rather than clicking Send/receive in Outlook. Am I missing something?
RSS is brilliant. I use Google Reader (so I have it everywhere including my phone) and it does my podcasts.
Think of it as a summary of all the posts for all the websites, blogs etc you follow without having to go to each and see if there is a new post. Wouldn't use Outlook though. Plenty of RSS Aggregators around, but I more than happy with Reader.
+1 for Google Reader, it works really well on phones and integrates with Google Listen for podcasts on the go.
RSS is a quick way to subscribe to a constantly updated stream of info Tom, whether it's magazine or newspaper articles, podcasts, etc. The advantage is that you can then pool all your various sources into one place instead of having to hop around 20 websites checking for updates.
The basic idea is that blogs and other sites which update regularly have a “feed” - a file on the site which contains a summary of the most recent updates. A feed reader, which is a program, scans the feeds regularly (either manually or automatically) and shows its user any new posts they haven't already read. In some ways it's like the GBF front page showing which threads have new posts only for lots of different blogs across the net.
It's really handy with blogs that only update once a month or so.
You can either subscribe to a separate service, like Google Reader, to do the scanning for you or you can run a desktop reader, like RSSOwl, on your own machine. Personally, I prefer to keep the list of blogs I'm interested in on my own machine rather than feed that information into the maw of Google.
I have maybe 80 feeds set up in RSSOwl so, with one button click, I can check for changes to any¹ of them.
I haven't bothered to even try with GBF - there's enough traffic here that there's almost always something new every time I visit anyway.
You can often actually read the blog entries in the feed reader but I don't bother - I just click on entries I want to read to read them in my browser.
¹ Actually, most of them. There are a few blogs which appear dead for now but might wake up again in the future so I have those in a separate folder which I only update occasionally.
By the way, there are two flavours of feed around, RSS and Atom. RSS is the original and itself comes in lots of versions which are wildly incompatible with each other to the point that the files look completely different. Atom is the newer format and is much better standardized. Many sites offer feeds in both formats but for end users it doesn't really matter which you pick. I tend to choose Atom if given the choice but that's just 'cause I like standards. People sometimes use the word “RSS” to mean either - bit like Hoover or whatever.
<blockquote><cite>Posted By: fostertom</cite>That adds up to a great briefing - thanks - why are most IT writers out there incapable of explanation that actually works for a non-teenage audience?</blockquote>
Because most organisations get rid of anyone in IT over 30 because they cost too much?