Print
Discuss
Send to friend
RSS feedsAlmost anyone can publish on the internet and, whether good or bad, this information is increasing.
From academic beginnings to a global network, the internet is awash with information. Sorting the useful from the irrelevant is tricky, and keeping up with the good stuff can be a hassle.
Few people have the time to surf dozens of sites every day, so a mechanism for staying abreast is needed. Enter Really Simple Syndication - or RSS.
An RSS feed is a digest of site content provided in XML format. An RSS reader, or 'aggregator', takes feeds from various sites and provides a common interface with which to browse, search and organise the content. If something catches your eye, click through to the full article.
Sites effectively have a common interface in the RSS reader, and feeds can be harvested automatically to a schedule.
Lightweight and simple in structure, RSS feeds are simple for site maintainers to set up. Most big news sites offer feeds (vnunet.com and PCW, for example) and weblog (blog) software often includes RSS feed generation.
An RSS reader can cover the spectrum, from keeping up with hobbyist blogs, to getting your daily fill of international news.
Although RSS has been around since 1999, its recent popularity has been spurred by the rise of blogging. Tumultuous world affairs and an apparently unaffected deluge of new gadgets and technology have also played a part.
With the growing supply of sites providing RSS feeds across diverse topics and a sufficient supply of quality aggregators, now is an excellent time to investigate the RSS option.
An RSS feed is an XML text file. XML is now an almost ubiquitous formatting standard for exchanging data, and the different RSS versions are all relatively simple examples.
A feed contains 'channels', and aggregators often refer to individual feeds as channels. Most feeds contain only a single channel, splitting their content into multiple feeds which cover different areas.
vnunet.com, for example, has 'News', 'Comment' and 'Analysis' feeds. The BBC has somewhere between 60 and 70 feeds covering many different areas, although most are news-based.
Thankfully, users need not worry about the plethora of versions, as RSS aggregators generally support all the specifications.
The level of detail in a feed will depend partly on the RSS version it uses, but most sites provide only headline, link and sometimes summary information in their feeds. More sophisticated feeds might also provide additional elements using the extension options.
Personal productivity
Browsing content across diverse sites is much faster using an RSS aggregator than surfing manually; not only is the interface consistent across all content, but the content uses less memory.
For example, where a homepage to a large site might run to 100KB, a headline in an RSS feed is perhaps 1KB. The whole feed for a site is likely to load faster than a single content page.
Sophisticated aggregators, such as Feed Demon, have a grouping mechanism - folders being the most popular. Different sites can be arbitrarily combined to cover a topic.
If you prefer to get your headlines from a few large news sites, but your favourite comment is in blogs, you can group them together then browse that folder, rather than wading through numerous diverse sources.
Beyond browsing feeds you can use an aggregator to do some legwork for you in pulling together information. This is especially useful when dealing with large mainstream news outlets, such as the BBC or CNN.
A feed that contains stories covering everything might not be that useful if all you're interested in is finding out about the Middle East. A few well-placed searches will help cut down the noise level.
In action
Desktop RSS aggregators have evolved to a particular interface style. If you've used an email client, such as Microsoft Outlook or Ximian Evolution, the layout will be familiar.
A vertical panel to the left contains folders, and to its right at the top is a listing of the current folder content, with a preview pane at the bottom.
A popular alternative is to have all three panes side-by-side, with folders on the left, headlines in the centre and the preview pane to the right.
Different sites and different content types have varying update frequencies. An aggregator can poll feeds for updates every so often, and automatically download any changes.
Some aggregators have a single interval setting which is global across all feeds. Others, such as Feed Demon, are more sophisticated, allowing you to set the interval for individual feeds, or for the folders that group them.
Watching feeds for specific content is an aggregator feature that doesn't have an equivalent in regular browsing, and so once tried it becomes rapidly indispensable.
To the desktop, and beyond
Not all aggregators are conventional desktop programs. Some run a local web server on your machine and present the user interface entirely in a web browser.
This can be a little clunky alongside polished integrated readers such as Feed Demon, but does have advantages. The first being you can access your RSS aggregator remotely, using a web browser. So, if you have a broadband connection, you could check on your feeds from a cafe or from work.
Amphetadesk is one such aggregator. Written in Perl, it's available for Windows, Mac OS9, and as source for building on Linux and Mac OSX. It is free, includes a Perl interpreter and doesn't require elaborate set up.
It uses your existing web browser to display feeds and set-up details, while the back end handles the in-built mini web server and the business of polling feeds.
Amphetadesk has fewer features than some standalone aggregators, such as Feed Demon; there's no searching option, update frequency is set globally across all sites, and it lacks a grouping option.
On the other hand, it provides a clean interface, a good example being the mini web-server/browser-style of aggregator, allowing you to browse your feeds from other machines besides the hosting system.
And the web-based nature of Amphetadesk opens up another handy feature: one-click subscription to feeds. Some sites feature icons marked with the Amphetadesk logo. Clicking will navigate your browser to your local copy of Amphetadesk to subscribe to the given channel.
A third style of aggregator is as a plug-in to existing software. NewsGator is a shareware plug-in for Microsoft Outlook, offering integrated email and RSS browsing.
It also adds an option to the context menu of IE, so when you see a feed icon on a site you can right-click and add it to your feed line-up.
Finding feeds
Having an aggregator is of little use if you can't find an RSS feed. There's no standard way for a site to announce the presence of RSS feeds, and no standard location in a site's URL. But some conventions for denoting a feed have evolved.
Besides using icons, many sites use the path '/rss' to point to a feed. Or, if they have several feeds, paths beneath /rss may be used. vnunet.com has several feeds, but will automatically supply the news feed given if you enter www.vnunet.com/rss.
Of course, it's not always that easy, and if a webmaster has a different idea to you on feed location, you may be out of luck. Often aggregators come preloaded with a list of feeds, and sites dedicated to cataloguing feeds help fill the gap.
Syndic8 is the most impressive. It's free and community supported and whether you're taking your first steps with RSS or looking to tune up your selection of feeds, it's a good starting point.
You can search for feeds by keyword, or pick from a variety of feeds selected by popularity, most recent or just randomly suggested from the Syndic8 list.
Having evolved steadily over a couple of years, Syndic8 also features an impressive statistics system which shows graphically which RSS versions, languages and so on are most popular.
Even more useful, the statistics system includes quality of service information and validation information for feeds. This is a powerful service which finds feeds that are available and frequently updated.
There's also a good selection of advice and links for webmasters and budding bloggers interested in syndicating their own content, and plenty of opportunities for volunteering to help syndicate existing sites which don't yet provide RSS feeds.
Another searchable feed catalogue is Newsisfree. It's a little different from Syndic8, and offers both free and paid-for services. You can browse feeds by category in a directory-style format, and the site provides feeds of its own for many sites that don't offer them.
With its different set-up options, Newsisfree blurs the line between feed directory and aggregator. It's not quite as convenient as a local aggregator for daily browsing - each click is a page load, which tends to be slower than a local program - but it's a useful service and another good way of tracking down feeds.
Other options
There are several competing syndication formats besides RSS. Some aggregators support multiple options, which are most common among blog sites. Some have sprung up in response to limitations in RSS with its limited extendability.
But the simplicity and relative ease of implementing RSS have helped drive its widespread adoption. Generally, if a site provides feeds, it probably provides an RSS feed. This inertia makes RSS your best option when looking into aggregation on the desktop.
Bringing it together
RSS makes accessing your daily (or hourly) web updates a much more manageable process. You can scan at a glance the latest news from your favourite sites and blogs, and quickly skip over items that are not interesting or not relevant without waiting ages for pages to load. And once you've added a site to your aggregator, that's one less URL you have to remember to visit.
With the growing web information that is generated every day, an RSS aggregator can take much of the frustration out of sifting through and keeping up with the latest news and information.
RSS FEEDS
An aggregator is no good without feeds, so here are a few resources to help get you started:
PCW
www.pcw.co.uk/rss/news
www.pcw.co.uk/rss/comment
www.pcw.co.uk/rss/analysis
BBC
Finding links to feeds at the BBC can be tricky, as there are dozens. Userland.com has a helpful list supplied by a BBC webmaster.
backend.userland.com/2003/06/24
Syndic8
A directory of feeds with quality of service and other information.
www.syndic8.com
Newsisfree
Directory service and many custom-built feeds for sites which don't provide native RSS.
www.newsisfree.com
READER SELECTION
There are dozens of RSS readers available with varying degrees of functionality. Many are free, some are shareware and some are commercial offerings. Some of the readers we've tried and liked are listed below, but try out a few and see which one best suits your browsing habits.
Feed Demon
OS: Windows
Price: still in free beta, price TBC
www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon
RSSreader
OS: Windows
Price: Free
www.rssreader.nl
Amphetadesk
OS: Windows, Mac, Linux
Price: Free
www.disobey.com/amphetadesk
Radiouserland
OS: Windows, Mac OS9, OSX
Price: $39.95 (£23 approx)
radio.userland.com
Sharpreader
OS: Windows (requires Microsoft .Net Framework v1.1)
Price: Free
www.sharpreader.net
NewsGator Outlook RSS plug-in
Price: Free to try, $29 to buy (£17 approx)
www.newsgator.com
See also:
All Online
del.icio.us
Digg this
reddit!
