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Feed Me! -- Cool Web Thingies: RSS, News and Blogs
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RSS is catching on, and rightfully so. It's one of those really cool ideas which continue to make the internerd better, more useful, and cooler.
RSS is Really Simple Syndication. It allows one website to share content with other websites, or applications, in a standardized manner. Where previously, if you wanted to, for instance, display recent Newsweek stories, you would require a script or program which would fetch the newsweek.com homepage and try to strip the needed information out of the source code. Even if you got that working it would break every time newsweek.com modified their layout code.
With RSS this is easy. RSS is an XML format, it is structured and very simple to parse, it made something which was previously more work than it was worth in development and maintenance time into something that developers can easily use with confidence that things won't suddenly break because some html was modified.
But what does that mean to YOU?! I realize most of you probably don't care about the technicalities, so i'll show you a few cool, useful things you can do with RSS without knowing much at all about RSS.
Asylum RSS
First of all, the asylum homepage and blogs now come complete with validated RSS feeds. There are 3 types of feeds:The Asylum pages with feeds have a rss icon in the header title, as seen here:
If you see this icon, you know there's a feed for that page, and more importantly, you know the address to that feed because it's a link. You can click on it, or right click on it and select "copy link" or "copy link location" to get the feed url.
How to Find an RSS Feed
Many websites have an icon of some sort on their homepage to indicate a feed, some similar to the icon Asylum uses, but many others, and some without any icons or links at all. In that case you'll have to do some minor sleuthing.
Firefox comes in handy here, because it will tell you if a webpage provides a feed. A RSS icon in the lower right hand corner of the browser indicates the website you're viewing provides an RSS feed:
If you think or know a website has a feed, but you can't or don't want to bother to find the url to the feed, it's not at all hard to determine in the page source. Click the "View Menu" of your browser and select "Page Source". You'll see a whole bunch of scary code, but don't fear, what you seek is near.
The info you want will typically be in the head of the document, which means at the top. The info should be in a <link rel="alternate" href="..."> tag. Look for something like this:
The value of "href" is your feed address.
How to Use an RSS Feed
So yeah yeah, you've got the address, now what the fuck do you do with it? That's a good question, after all the whole purpose of finding a feed is to use it somehow, but how?
Google Homepage
One of my favorites is the google homepage at http://www.google.com/ig. You may have to create a Google account to save your preferences, but it's worth it.
After you create an account or login, on your Google Home page, click the "Add Content" link in the top left corner to expand the menu.
This expands to give you a whole bunch of popular things to add to your start page. Go ahead and add some, hell add them all if you want. They have some cool stuff you can add just by clickin.
Then notice the last section, "Create A Section", this is a spot where you can finally use those RSS urls! Enter an asylum RSS url, for example http://www.asylumnation.com/blogs/index.rss , and it will be added to your homepage. Pretty cool, right? There are literally millions of feeds you can add to this page, you can create a homepage here that will give you all the latest news stories from all the sources you care about most, and organize them as you see fit.
My Google homepage, each section can be dragged and dropped into a new place:
Now set your Google start page as your default home page in your browser options.
Firefox Bookmarks
Firefox has a really cool feature, you can bookmark an RSS feed and it will automatically check the feed and update the bookmarks, so you get a dynamic list of headlines.
If you click the firefox RSS icon described above:
and select "Subscribe to the feed", you can create a dynamic bookmark group of stories. Place your feed bookmarks in the toolbar to make it even more useful:
Newsreaders
Figure this out yourself, there are a ton of different newsreaders out there, some do cool fancy things like show an alert from your system tray when one of your feeds posts an update, others don't do much of anything fancy, but they all read your feeds.
Other Stuff
This is by no means the limit, but it is the end of my time here today. Now that you know about RSS, and you know how you can use RSS, you can keep your eyes peeled for new feeds and put them to good use. There are many applications other than what i've described here, such as cell phones, GPS, MP3 playlists, newslists, forums, anything under the sun. You could probably even set your google start page as your active desktop very easily. Anyways, the point is embrace it or die in pain, sluts.
That's all folks.
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