Variable Fragment

I’m writing this for friends and family who may not be aware of the value of using RSS to keep up with news and periodically updated sites. If you learned about this post via your feed reader then you can skip this article…

RSS stands for “really simple syndication,” and it’s a way that a website can provide a list of their content in a standard way. It’s like a wire service, or an index of the site’s content, updated whenever the site changes.

This is useful because these news “feeds” can be subscribed to and “aggregated” by any number of free or commercial applications. To check your news sites you simply open your feed reader and it will present a list of the recent content from all of your subscribed sites.

Let me give you an example. I use Google Reader, their free, web-based news aggregator. I’ve used a number of readers, but I prefer the google interface, and like that it is available from any location.

Let’s say I find some web site that’s updated infrequently, like my blog. I want to know when there’s an update, but I don’t want to go check it every day. I see that in the address bar of Firefox there is an icon on the far right that looks like radio waves.

I click that icon to subscribe to the articles from variablefragment.com. I’m given the choice in firefox to add it to my google homepage or to Reader. I click reader.

Here is what I see when I open Google Reader.

You can see a list of sites that I subscribe to on the left site, most of which are in folders that I created. I see that there are some new articles in my blogs folder, so I click that folder and see the following:

You can see that the contents of the articles, or short summaries, are shown on the right. As I scroll down in that list, every article that I scroll past is marked as read, so that it will disappear the next time I open Reader.

Google Reader also allows you to flag interesting articles to share with other people (you could subscribe to my “shared items” feed, so that you will see any articles that I flag), or you can mark interesting articles with a “star” so that you can find them again.

I find this to be a great way to keep up with a lot of sites, see summaries of content and visit articles that look interesting, without having to actually go to dozens of websites to see what’s new. If you haven’t considered using RSS to view your news, give it a shot. It’s a way to take control of the content so you see more that you are interested in without wasting time on everything else.