Thursday, April 28, 2005

The fantastic world of RSS readers

If your list of blogs to consult seems to become more and more difficult to control, you might want to think about investing a little bit of time in setting up an RSS reader. RSS stands either for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. Simply put, a website can choose to broadcast or syndicate its content; an RSS reader tracks these syndications down and alerts you when a new entry has been made on the website. This works for blogs but also for news and sports sites.

For Mac users, you can either upgrade to Mac OS X: Tiger which includes a new version of Safari with RSS capabilities built in, or you can download NetNewsWire Lite; it's free but you have to scroll all the way down on the page to find the download link. PC users can use Mozilla's e-mail client Thunderbird as an RSS reader. There are several options out there, but these are a few I might recommend.

Once you download the program, you just look for the address upon which the site is syndicating. For blogspot sites, just add /atom.xml to any address and voila. For others, you might have to do some hunting. Happy blogging!