TKSham – More than just a Developer

RSS is a kind of standardized Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works. (Well, if you have worked with Web design/ development, you will know there are lots of thing not standardized in Internet.) An RSS document (which is commonly called a “feed”) includes full or summarized text.

Here is how my blog’s feed (http://tksham.com/blog/feed) looks like in browser.

So much information now, but why am I introducing RSS to you?

RSS benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites that readers can aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

In other words, you don’t even have to click, enter the URL to visit several websites. You just make a single click on desktop-based or web-based RSS online reader to read all of the new updates.

It sucks for reading news in separate windows…just imagine you have 7 favorite websites, you have to open 7 windows everyday just to get updated.

You can take a look of several website and see if the website supports RSS by finding the RSS icon. 

For Internet Explorer, you will find the RSS lighted on.

For Firefox, the icon is on the URL bar.

You can just bookmark the RSS and you will have the simplest way to read RSS feeds.

But there is a more professional way to manage your own feed.
Take a look of my bloglines reader.

I subscribe lots of feeds and read them everyday.

You can see the list of my subscribed feeds, the number on the left is the new article that I have not yet read, while the number in light-blue are the articles that I saved.

You can register and starting using Bloglines right away. But I am writing a walkthrough for using another similar reader – Google readers.
http://reader.google.com/

(Though personally I like Bloglines better as it starts much earlier than Google’s one. Anyway I think more people have Gmail account that they can use the reader without creating an account)

Actually using Feed Reader is really simple, you can just press the Add a subscription and try to paste the URL onto the Form and “Add”. You can now have your feed already!

In case you find one of the posts very interesting, but you do not have time to read the whole thing, you can try to use the Keep unread function.

If you are new to RSS, or do not know which website is interesting/ inspiring, you can just download my list and import this file by Manage subscriptions >> Import

TKSham recommend: google-reader-subscriptions