An article from Wall Street Journal on RSS

[Belinda Wong-Swanson]

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY
By WALTER S. MOSSBERG

A Guide to Using RSS,
Which Helps You Scan
Vast Array of Web Sites
May 5, 2005; Page B1

If you read a dozen or more online news sites every day, managing them
all can be difficult. In the most popular Web browser, Microsoft's
Internet Explorer, you have to laboriously open them one at a time. You
can open each in a separate window, but the windows pile up in the task
bar at the bottom of the screen, making a visual mess that is hard to
navigate.

One good solution is to use a more modern browser with a feature called
tabbed browsing. These browsers -- such as Firefox for Windows PCs and
Apple Computer's Macintosh models; or Apple's own Safari browser for the
Mac -- allow you to open many pages simultaneously, in the same window.
Each page is marked by a file-folder-style tab, and you can switch among
them by just clicking on the tabs.

But even tabbed browsers have a limit. If you try to open dozens, or
scores, of Web pages at once, the tabs either become too small to show
what Web site they represent, or they slide off the screen and can't be
easily seen.

So power users have been employing a system called RSS that allows them
to quickly scan large numbers of newsy, frequently updated Web sites.
RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a kind of computer
code that Web site owners can add to their sites to make them easier to
scan quickly.

When interpreted by special RSS-savvy software programs called "news
readers" or "news aggregators," the RSS code allows these programs to
display only the headlines and short summaries of these news sites'
latest articles. This is called an "RSS feed." Users can "subscribe" to
various feeds and quickly scan the headlines and summaries. Then, if
they so choose, they can click on a link to read the entire article.

Some RSS addicts regularly scan hundreds of such feeds each day. The
news-reader software keeps scooping up the freshest headlines from the
RSS feeds, and signals when new headlines are available.

RSS, and a competing syndication system called Atom, were first used by
people who write Web logs, or blogs -- newsy, diary-type Web sites where
entries are added in sequence. Later, the Web sites of traditional news
organizations added RSS feeds.

For awhile, the use of these feeds was mainly the province of techies.
The reader software you needed to use them wasn't well known to
mainstream Web surfers, and the process of subscribing to a feed
involved clicking on an orange button on the site unhelpfully labeled
"XML," which is the name of the computer language in which the RSS code
is written. If you clicked on these buttons in a standard Web browser,
all you saw was a page of gobbledygook.

Now, however, RSS feeds are going mainstream. Both the Firefox and
Safari browsers have built-in, easy-to-use RSS readers. There also are
some add-in news readers for Internet Explorer, and even for Microsoft's
Outlook email program.

In Firefox, whenever you reach a Web page with an RSS feed, an orange
icon appears at the lower right of the screen. If you click on the icon,
Firefox lets you add the feed to your browser as if it were a bookmark.
But these bookmarks are "live." They are constantly receiving new
headlines from the feed. When you click on them, a drop-down list of the
freshest headlines appears. Click on the headline, and the story appears.

In the latest version of the Safari browser, called Safari RSS, Apple
has gone even further. When Safari reaches a page with an RSS feed, an
icon labeled "RSS" appears next to the Web address at the top of the
screen. If you click on it, you can add the feed as if it were a
bookmark, as in Firefox. But Safari can instantly generate a beautifully
laid-out special Web page that displays all the headlines and summaries
from one, or even all, of your RSS feeds.

There also are some products, such as Feed Scout (www.bytescout.com
<http://www.bytescout.com>), that add a special toolbar to Internet
Explorer, giving that aging browser the ability to act as an RSS reader.

Of course, you also can use a stand-alone news reader. These contain
many more features than the browsers do for managing and organizing
feeds. Examples of news readers for Windows include FeedDemon and Awasu.
On the Mac, my favorite is NetNewsWire. All these readers, and many
others, are available for download at www.download.com
<http://www.download.com>.

Some other products, notably NewsGator, take a different approach. They
add RSS capabilities to email programs, and treat RSS headlines and
summaries like email. NewsGator, also available at www.download.com,
effectively turns Microsoft Outlook into a news reader.

Some news readers don't require any software at all. They are simply Web
sites that allow you to subscribe to, and search, RSS feeds. One is
called BlogLines, at www.bloglines.com <http://www.bloglines.com>.
Another is PubSub, at www.pubsub.com <http://www.pubsub.com>. Feedster,
at www.feedster.com <http://www.feedster.com>, is a search engine for
RSS feeds. It specializes in custom RSS feeds comprised of items it
finds on specific topics you search for.

Whichever approach you choose, if you are a news-oriented Web surfer who
wants the latest stuff from a broad range of sources, RSS can be a great
boon.

*Write to* Walter S. Mossberg at [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>.


-------------- next part --------------
Skipped content of type multipart/related

[David Williams]

Hi Belinda's post made me wonder if Friam has an RSS feed.  
Surprisingly, it doesn't seem to have one.

Has anybody considered podcasting the Friday morning meetings?  I have
to admit that I haven't been to one and don't know if they are a good
candidate, but I sure know that I would go to one if my circumstances
allowed.  I certainly would listen to one if they were in a podcast.

Just as an aside, there seems to be a large collection of RSS feeds
about New Mexico here:

http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/9849.html