RSS Feed ‘Quick and Dirty’

274 Views Thu, 01 Feb 2007 at 05:15 am

A friend once asked me what is RSS and what is it for. In sort, utilizing the RSS (web feed) you can easily and quickly got the latest update from any sites that you are subscribing in. For a blog, this means you will be notified if a new entry is made by the author. For news sites, the latest news will be automatically arrive to your RSS reader. For a forum, you can quickly find out that a new reply has been posted by someone. And so on, and so on.

The illustration below should give easy explanation on how to start using web feed. This illustration is based on the assumption that the browser used is Firefox ver. 2.0.1 (get your copy here if you have not had one) and the RSS Reader to be used is Google Reader.

Web Feed using Google Reader (1/4)

Do the same steps for every feeds that you want to subscribe to, and From now on, you only need to open the Google Reader homepage to find the latest updates to the feeds you are following.

Further tips:

As your subscription is getting longer, most likely you will love the ability to group similar subscriptions into folders (news, friends-blog, etc.). All you need to do is just click the “Feed Setting” drop down in the right top, and add it into an existing folder or creates a new one.
The keyboard shortcut in Google Reader is very very very useful (especially when you are following tens or hundreds of highly active web feeds). Complete list of keyboard shortcut is available here. Here are the few that I used the most:
1. ‘j‘ to go down to the next post within a subscription, ‘k‘ for the reverse.
2. Press Shift+’j’ or Shift+’k’ (i.e. ‘J’ and ‘K’ in capital) to go up and down in the subscription list on the left side, then press Shift+’o’ to open the highlighted subscription.
3. Press Shift+’x’ to expand or collapse folder list.
4. Press ‘v’ to opens the original source for this article in a new window (I can not be sure which Firefox options should be enabled to make this shortcut opens the original article in a new TAB. I altered the Firefox options long time ago, and once it works, I forgot which modification I made to do this )
If somehow Firefox cannot automatically find the web feed of a website (i.e. in the illustration above the yellow icon does not appear in the Location Bar), you can manually find it. Read the guidance here.
As always, if you want to investigate further, wikipedia provides a good starting point.
Last one: Web feeds are addictive!! Do not become an RSS junkie, you have been warned .