Clete's Blog

RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is a kind of news feed created so that users could have more simplified access to their news. Most blogs, news organizations, and websites that are updated frequently contain RSS (or Atom, another kind of news syndication) feeds. RSS feeds are also referred to as live bookmarks in Firefox. Basically, Firefox’s implementation lets you see a bookmark folder that updates with each new story that is released. See below for an example.

Here we see that it’s just a big list of news stories posted on my favorite website, Engadget.

This works well, except for when you have 10-15 feeds that you subscribe to. It becomes very tedious to click on each feed and then go into the main website and view every new story. It’s quite a pain to click on each site individually, go back a few pages, and pick up where you left off. That’s when Google Reader comes into play. Google Reader is a RSS feed tool, where you add all of your favorite feeds and Google keeps track of them for you. It will do much more than Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. It actually shows the content of each post, saving you from having to visit the website. Below is a screenshot of Google Reader in action (click to enlarge).

Here, I can sort all of my websites in to folders. See “Geek News,” “Comics,” etc. Also note that I have one new post. Google keeps track of what I have read. I can also star items, just like in GMail. It will save that item for me later. If I click on an individual story, it will expand into a view similar to that of what an actual visitor would see if they were to visit the website, images and all.

Google Reader is a great tool for you to keep up with a lot of websites — all at once. It’s a great news reader and I would recommend it to anyone who reads even just two websites per day.

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Uncategorized by Clete Blackwell II