Why should you be using RSS?
RSS, or "Really Simple Syndication"*, can make your life much simpler, especially if you have several websites that you like to check for new content each day. Most active content sites today provide RSS feeds. RSS feeds provide you a way to get the new content from a website without having to visit that website. It used to be that if you wanted a site to let you know when they added new content, you had to register with them and give them your email address. They could then email you when they updated the website. But they could also email for anything else and they could also sell your email address to other companies for a little extra cash. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to see if there was a new article posted at vbpc.org, or strobist.com, or photoshop.tv without having to go to the site and without having to give them your email address? RSS to the rescue! Click here to read more.
You will see that here on the vabeachphotoclub.org website, there is an RSS feed (the icon is on the right side of the front page, under the most recent gallery images). If you click on that icon, you will get a rather strange rendering of the most recent postings to the front page (including this one). But what good is that if you have to click on that icon? Well, you don't have to click on it. Here's what you do. First you need an RSS feed reader. There are many free readers out there. They all look a lot like email clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird with different panes for different things. There are also web clients like hotmail or gmail. I am going to teach you how to set up a web client to read RSS feeds, and the web client will come from our good friend Google.
Go to http://www.google.com/reader. If you have a google account, log in. If you don't have a google account, go ahead and create one--it's free and only takes a minute to set up. After you have created your account, go ahead and log in. You will see a new page where you can add your first rss subscription and even watch a welcome video. Watch the video if you want, but let's add some feeds! Click on the "Add Subscription" link and type or paste this in the pop-up box
http://vabeachphotoclub.org/rss.xml
You should now see the last ten posts made to the front page of this site.
Let's add a couple more feeds
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip
http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/feed/
http://norfolk.craigslist.org/pho/index.rss
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/23951026/posts/default?orderby=published
Now by having all of your feeds to your favorite websites all in one place, you can just go to one page (http://www.google.com/reader) and see what's new. Pretty cool, huh?
So, what sites have RSS feeds? Most sites today with periodically updated content (i.e., blogs and news pages, comic strips, and a few other specialty sites which I will go over in just a minute). You see the icon on the page, usually in the margin somewhere, that will indicate whether or not a particular site has an RSS feed. If you click on the icon, you will probably get a page with a listing of all of the most recent postings that have been made to the site. There may also be some options at the top of the page to help you subscribe to that feed with your feed reader. I usually get an option to subscribe to a feed using google reader, but it depends on your web browser and operating system.
There are some other cool things you can do with RSS. I gave you a link to one of them with the link to the Norfolk Photography Craigslist feed. That feed will update you with the most recent "for sale" ads posted to Craigs List. But you can also get weather alerts, TV listings, sports scores, and horoscope updates all over RSS. Here are some pages that have links to some of the more interesting RSS feeds.
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/06/35_ways_you_can.html
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/presentations/os2005/ben_hammersley.pd...
http://lab.arc90.com/2006/06/25_new_ways_to_use_rss.php
Of course, you can always ask The Google for suggestions on more photography feeds. In that box that pops up when you click on "Add Subscription", just type in a search term, such as "photography". Google will return all the feeds about photography that it knows about.
When it comes to reading the individual feeds in Google Reader, I personally like to use the j and k keys and set the view to show only new items instead of all items. The j key marches forward to the next message and the k key moves backwards (in case I go too fast). You can press the ? key for a popup of all the keystrokes that you can use.
I hope that you will find this article helpful. I now subscribe to about 80 feeds. It takes me about 15 minutes each day to go through them all. I couldn't imagine how long it would take to go to each of those web sites every day.
*RSS may also stand for a few other things, namely "RDF Site Summary" and "Rich Site Summary". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss for more information.