Tuesday, October 09, 2007

RSS Feeds

Recently, I came across the term called RSS which denotes Rich Site Summary. All it means is that, you can keep track of websites for its contents without having to manually visit the list of websites that you normally read. You just log-on to this one site which keeps track of all the latest information from the sites that you are interested in. There are several feeder/aggregator software out in the web. Some of them run on your PC and downloads the feeds as and when you log-on to internet so that you can read the information offline. Some of the web-based software needs you log-on to a site which will contain the feeds from your preferred websites.

I tried Google Reader and it has a descent interface that is simple to use. The log-in is the same as your gmail-account. Try using it and I am sure you will like it...No more worries about missing a blog or news from your favourite website, unless you have too much time at your disposal and you insist that you like to manually type the web site every few minutes...:)... If others have suggestions/experiences about using RSS versus Atom versus XML, do share it.

4 comments:

Mad Max said...

The concept is really cool..i dont know much about the alternatives though...

Manohar said...

I don't think XML qualifies as a reader. Its another markup language- a sucessor to XHTML and HTML.. and lot more flexible.
Btw, most of ur existing browsers support RSS Feed.

I use firefox and it recognizes webpages with RSS and i can bookmark the feed directly. Clicking on the bookmark will just give a popdown of the feed headlines. For example- gmail has a rss feed to show new emails.

Manohar said...

@mindframes: Let me qualify my statement a bit more. I meant XML doesn't qualify as a reader- in the way HTML doesn't qualify as a reader. You could have XML based readers.. just like one has HTML based applicatons.

Suresh Sankaralingam said...

You are right. Looks like RSS format is specified using XML and it was my mis-interpretation.

Also, in RSS-2.0, the latest version the RSS denotes Really Simple Syndication... (source: RSS wikipedia page)