RSS Readers

As you spend more time on the web, you’ll find more and more sites that you want to read on a regular basis, and eventually, you’ll have more sites than you feel that you can keep up with.  You’ll realize that it’s been weeks since you visited some of those sites, and then when you look at them, you’ll find so many new articles there that you decide that it’s too much and quit reading.

But there’s hope.  Enter the RSS reader.  This is an application that makes it easy for you to keep up with your favorite web sites, even if you’re reading a lot of them.

It looks and acts a lot like an email program – in fact, many email programs have built in RSS readers.  In most email programs, to the left, you’ll have a list of folders, and on the right, you’ll usually have two separate window panes, one showing a list of emails, displaying the sender, subject, and date, and a second pane showing the actual text of whatever email you’ve selected.  An RSS reader will have a similar interface – a list of sites on the left, and on the right, two panes, one showing a list of articles on the site you have selected, and a second showing content from that article.

So let’s say you’re looking around on the web and you find a site that you like a lot and want to keep up with.  Many sites will have a link somewhere on the page that allows you to subscribe to its RSS feed.  Sometimes it’s just text that says “RSS” or “Subscribe to our feed” or something like that.  Other times, it’s the international RSS feed logo that looks like this:

If you have an RSS reader installed, clicking on that link will add that site to the list of other sites in your RSS reader.  Now, every time you open your RSS reader, you’ll see that site listed there.  When you click on that site within the RSS reader, over on the right, you’ll see a list of headlines for each article on that site.  You can quickly scan those headlines, and if you see an article that looks interesting, clicking on it will that article.  Depending on how the site itself is configured, you may see only a short summary of the article (which you can then double click to open the entire article) or you’ll see the whole thing.

Some of the larger sites have several different RSS feeds.  News sites, for instance, may have one feed for international news, one for business, one for sports, and an overall feed for all news.  Most blogs, including this one, have feeds, so you can find out when a new post has been added without having to check the site every day.

Once you’ve got a list of sites you’ve subscribed to (subscribing is free) in your RSS reader, it’s quick and easy to just click on each site, scan the headlines of new articles, and read only the articles that grab your attention.  You’ll know at a glance which sites have posted new articles since you last looked at them, and which haven’t.  You can even bookmark the really good articles and come back to them later.

As far as specific RSS readers go, you have lots of options, which fall into two categories: Web based, and desktop application.  A web based RSS reader is essentially just a web page that you access by using a web browser.  It has all of the standard RSS reader features, but you can only access it when you’re online.  A desktop reader, on the other hand, is a separate application, and when you open it, as long as you’re online, it will download all new content from all of your subscribed sites, which means that even after you go offline, you can still read all of that downloaded content.  This is not true for a web based RSS reader.

While there are plenty of options, I’ll only tell you about three of them:

Desktop RSS Readers
FeedDemon – for Windows.  Click here.
NetNewsWire – for Mac OS X.  Click here.

Web-Based Readers
Google Reader – www.google.com/reader

Once again, as always, if you’re new to all of this and would like to know more, please feel free to contact me at musicman@thirstyforjesus.org.

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