RSS? huh?

You may have heard or seen some discussion of this thing called “RSS.” You may not have. Either way, you bouts to get your learn’ on.

RSS is a neato invention of the web that allows you to bring together all sorts of content - blogs, blog comments, news, podcasts - into one place. When properly set up, it keeps track of what you have seen and haven’t seen yet, much like how email clients keep track of which messages are “Read” and “Unread.”

Here’s a picture of Eric’s RSS Reader setup, hurrah!

As you see, it keeps track of all the blogs (and blog comments) that I like to read. The ones that have a (1) or (2) by them indicate new postings, so I don’t have to sit there and refresh my favorite blogs over and over to see what they have posted, this lil gadget keeps track of it. Now, when you only look at 2 blogs, its easy to check both, but imagine the fun of me visiting all 16 of those blogs each day to see if you guys had updated? forget that.

So if you’ve read this far, I’ve potentially got you sold on this whole concept. Woot! Okay, so how do you set up all this shiny technological goodness? You first need an RSS reader. It’s the program that manages all the feeds you are subscribed to. A feed is just another word for the flow of content that comes from each site or blog you like. As you can see, I use a program called RSS Reader. It’s not really all that fancy, but it does the job.

You can try and find your own (they make fancier-pants ones), but if plain and simple works for you, here’s the link to download it, directly: rssreader.exe. For you Mac users, meh, here’s a mac one called NewsFire, which req Mac OS X 10.4 NewsFire link. Someone feel free to suggest a better alternative to either of these.

Once you get those setup, you need some blogs to subscribe to! This is where it gets fun. Each type of blog service (examples: Blogspot, Wordpress, Xanga) uses a different style of address formatting to allow you to get RSS feeds of their users. Let’s review them now:

For Blogger/Blogspot addresses:
The format is:
http://USER_NAME_GOES_HERE.blogspot.com/atom.xml
For example, for Emma’s blog, it’d be:
http://emmatatum.blogspot.com/atom.xml

For Xanga addresses:
The format is:
http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=USER_NAME_GOES_HERE
For example, for Casey’s blog (who’s Xanga user name is “horshack”), it’d be:
http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=horshack

For Wordpress blogs:
This is where it gets kinda tricky. If you look on the sidebar of this page, there’s a lil section that says

RSS
Comments RSS

Each of these goto a different link, which are the RSS feeds for the posts (the first one) and alllll the comments that you users lovingly bestow on me (the second one). As far as I know, there’s not anyway to get a feed of the comments from blogger or xanga blogs =(.

Anyway, here’s the feeds for my posts:
http://www.fraggedformysins.com/?feed=rss2
And my comments:
http://www.fraggedformysins.com/?feed=comments-rss2

For other WordPress blogs, like Ben’s, you’ll just have to look on the sidebar or at the bottom of the page for links to the RSS stuff.

So now you a reader, and you know how to get the address for new blogs, but what do you do with them! You go into RSS Reader, click Add, and paste that address in there. It will process it and add it to your list.

There’s also a way to mass import (or export) a flock of feeds to your friends. If you goto File -> Import Feeds, you can point it at a file, and it will process all the feeds on there and import them for you. Since I’m so nice, I’ve prepared a feed for the blogs (and comments where applicable) for some of deh Superfriends on my sidebar, and me! Just right click this link, pick Save Target As… or Save Link As…, and then have RSS Reader import it as listed above.

Superfriends.xml

I’ve focused on blogs, but oodles of other types of sites use RSS too, particularly news sites and podcasts. Find em! RSS rox!

FL: Today’s post was fairly geeky, so we all need a reminder why geek guys are the bestest: Why Geeks And Nerds Are Worth It…