Keep up with Your Favorite Sites in A Lot Less Time

You've probably seen this little orange icon on websites before (including this one):

But do you know what it means, or how fantastically useful it can be?

It's the symbol for RSS, which stands for "Really Simple Syndication" (or "Rich Site Summary," depending on who you ask.) Either way, it's a really practical tool that can save you time when you surf the Internet, especially if you have a bunch of favorite sites you visit regularly.

With an RSS reader, instead of checking each site individually in your web browser -- which may or may not have new content since the last time you checked -- you can view each site's RSS feed and be notified when the site updates. Instead of showing you content from the whole page, though, RSS readers will generally show you an article's title and first paragraph or so, making it really easy to skim through your favorite sites and just read what you want.

I use a program called Shrook, which works well with Mac computers, but all RSS readers work in basically the same way. Here are what some of my RSS feeds look like in my reader:

As you can see, Shrook uses a little yellow star to show when a site has been updated; I can then click on that site's listing and see summaries of the updates:

Then if I see an article that interests me, I can click on it, go to that page in my web browser and read the whole thing.

An RSS reader is ideal for keeping up with blogs, but you could also use it to, say, be notified when a certain airline flight goes on sale, or when someone puts that carburetor for your classic car up for auction on eBay. (A blogger named Jimmy R. has a good YouTube video on using RSS feeds in this way.)

Feedreader and Google Reader are two popular RSS readers, but there are tons of them out there, some with their own sets of bells-n-whistles. Blogger Paul Stamiatou (whom you may remember from his FiOS review a few months ago) wrote an excellent piece on RSS readers, highlighting the details of a few favorites, if you want to really drill down into some specifics.

Posted by Jim 2.0 | tagged: reader, RSS, internet, computer