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RSS feeds and you

I have been asked how to set up RSS feeds from many people in the past and usually it is so simple I don’t even think to post about it. But I feel like RSS feeds are finally becoming popular with the average computer user and I wanted to write this to help explain what RSS is and what it does.
What does RSS stand for? RSS is a acronym for Real Simple Syndication.
What does it do? Image you want to read the news. Now imagine it is 1949. What are you going to do? You go out and buy a news paper of course. What if you want local news, world news, and entertainment news on the 21st Academy Awards ceremony. At this point you have to drive around town and pick up at least three papers/magazines and now you need to drive home to read everything to get the content you want. Well what if you had all the papers delivered to your house? That is better right? But what if you had the paper delivered to your house and a butler that took the papers and cut out all the articles you didn’t want and recycled them to save trees? Then he laid out all the articles on your coffee table with your breakfast. That is what RSS feeds do, they are the butlers for our modern news.
Where did RSS feeds come from? In the past companies would use e-mail subscriptions to keep customers up to date on site and company news, and in certain cases e-mail subscriptions are still better, but when you are trying to keep up with site news instantly you can’t be bothered going to your email all the time. Of course some people still do like having their RSS feeds go right to their email inbox and there are plenty of ways to accomplish that as well. As a matter of fact Outlook 2007 even has this feature built in automatically.
Why do you want to use it? Well I don’t really know why YOU want to use it, but I use it to save hours of time when trying to keep up with friends, family, and technology. It also helps when I want to see what is going on at community sites like forums and blog comments. It helps even more when I have a site that doesn’t update often that I want to follow. It is hard to remember to actually go to that site but with RSS feeds the site comes to me.
What should you use for your RSS feeds? To be honest I have tried a lot of different software for my RSS feeds. I started out with RSSOwl, it worked really well but I found it limiting to only have my RSS feeds on one computer. If I wanted to read news at home I would have to remember what I read so I wouldn’t read it twice. I then moved on to Thunderbird Portable because I could keep it on my USB key and take it home with me whenever I wanted to read news at home. This worked well but then I wanted to read my news on my mobile phone and also on Linux/Apple computers. So I started searching for a web based solution that I could read all my news from and read it from any device that has a web browser. I started off with a couple small sites but then found Bloglines. I used Bloglines for quite a while but I had a bit of a falling out when they lost my saved articles and also when I saw this. I have been using Google reader for almost six months now and have been fairly happy with what it has to offer. The mobile version is a bit lacking compared to Bloglines and I have not found a good way to save articles for reading later and for future reference like I used to with Thunderbird and Bloglines. This should not stop you from using it though. Google Reader has lots to offer including integration with Gmail contacts so you can share articles with friends, very easy to use hotkeys, greasemonkey scripts to add functionality not already in Google Reader, and quite a few different ways to set up the view so you can read your articles the way you want to.

When it comes to getting news I can’t imagine life without my news butler. Because I got so long winded in this article I am going to follow it up with another article on how to set up RSS feeds with Google Reader.