opinios

Really Simple Sponging

I have been very late with jumping onto the whole RSS bandwagon.

A couple of years back when mass mailouts to your buddies were cool (?) a friend of mine, also named Matt, seemed to always be absorbing a ton of information.

For a while there (before he moved on to other obsessions like mobile GPS systems and current affairs radio) he was the ultimate source of crazy internet links. Every day it seemed like he had something new, fresh and funny to share with his online friends. And these weren't the usual crap that you get forwarded a few times a year, this was original, unusual stuff that had me in hysterics. Stuff like monobrow.com.

He also seemed to always be on top of the latest trends in the web publishing world, like a powerful little blogging tool named blosxom, which powered this very site for a year or so.

Knowing Matt to be the diligent and productive IT professional that he is, I couldn't imagine that he spent the entire day surfing the web, accumulating this information, yet I couldn't possibly see how he managed to come up with this stuff.

He shared his secret: RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.

When he first explained syndication to me, I didn't get it. It was something to do with XML that got the pages for you, but you needed something called an aggregator to read them. And on the Windows platform in 2001, the only free aggregator (I wasn't about to pay for something when I didn't know what it was!) was Syndirella.

So I downloaded Syndirella, installed it, and tried to give it a go. Things may have improved these days, but back then it wasn't intuitive. It kept giving me "broken feed" errors, and it was all too hard. I gave up pretty soon.

Besides, I thought, what benefit would this aggregation thing offer me? It doesn't take much time to visit a site to see if it has updated. My web browser (back then, Mozilla) had tabbed browsing, so I could load all of my favourite sites in one hit. And besides, I'd heard that these aggregators stripped away all the presentation and just gave you the bare content; How boring - I like looking at the design of a site! It shows the personality of the author (and in the case of a web designer's site, their credibility too).

However, I've certainly changed my tune.

Version 1.0 of the Thunderbird mail client includes an inbuilt RSS aggregator. You can set up folders for all of your favourite sites (the ones that offer an RSS feed), and it pulls in the content for you when those sites update. I didn't think it would be, but this is actually a massive time saver! I never realised how much time I spent visiting my favourite sites, one by one, being disappointed that they had not updated but admiring the design anyway, then moving on.

Now I don't have to waste time visiting a site that hasn't changed since I last visited it. I just have the equivalent of a number of "unread mail messages" in Thunderbird, and I peruse each of them, get on top of the latest information that I have chosen to aggregate, and it takes a quarter of the time.

Well, I must be honest. I don't spend any less time reading web design blogs. I just read more of them in the same amount of time!

So the point of my post is: I know that a lot of the readers of this site have yet to discover RSS. My advice is:

1. Download Thunderbird - aside from a lack of a calendar function, it is a far superior (read: secure) mail client than MS Outlook.


2. Visit some of your favourite sites and see if they offer an RSS feed. A lot of online newspapers these days do it, as do pretty much all the web design blogs.


3. Copy the URL for the feed you are interested in reading into Thunderbird, using the "Manage Subscriptions" menu option. There are sometimes different types of feeds; depending on how considerate the site author is, you may be able to choose by category, a short summary or the full article. It also offers you the option of viewing the styled web page or just the bare bones content.


4. Sit back and absorb your favourite sites from within Thunderbird, without having to check if they have updated, leaving you with more time for... reading other feeds!

Note: I must apologize in advance that opinios currently only offers a summary RSS feed. I haven't worked out how to change the Movable Type template to offer a complete feed (I admit, I didn't look terribly hard). This will all change when I change over to Textpattern, some time in the next couple of months.

Posted by mattymcg at March 1, 2005 09:27 PM