Aaron

    RSS Happiness

    Monday, June 23, 2008, 04:54 PM EST [General]

    So now it looks like thelotd is supporting RSS, been a long time coming for Lance's page to show up in my RSS reader.

    For the uninitiated, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, thats unimportant. What is important is that it gives you a way to make a central place to pull in all the kinds of stuff you are interested in. There are many RSS readers you can use, the one I use every single day is Google Reader. Googler Reader (http://reader.google.com) is free to use, and the one thing that I like the most about it, being an online reader it means it doesn't matter what computer I am using, I just log in to the google reader and it has all my feeds, and knows what I've read or marked for follow up, etc.

    This is important to me as I have a work computer, a computer in my home office, a computer on my TV serving as an HTPC, my wife's computer, etc. Doesn't matter where I am, Google Reader keeps all my stuff straight.

    So check out google reader, add Lance's RSS (which right now doesn't seem to be working well) and poke around, if you've never used RSS before I think you're in for a treat.

    Other Tricks:

    Once you're into RSS heavily you'll notice that you may have more stories to deal with each day than you really want to read. Other days may be lighter. On a typical day I'll have about 300 items waiting for me in Reader.

    The nice thing about reader is you can break things into multiple categories, and assign a feed to many different categories. Most of my feeds are assigned to two categories, one that sorts it into the kind of feed it is, and one that sorts priority, "High, Medium and Low". So Lance's RSS will go into "Sports, High" which means that if I log into my reader and there are over 1000 items (I've been away a while) I click on the "Low" heading and then mark all as read. That usually chops it down by 2/3rds. Lance being in my "High" category will still be unread, and will be waiting for me when I tab through it (I Usually sort oldest to newest)

    Also, another neat feature in Google Reader is the ability to Share items. I see something neat and think my friends might like to see it, I just click the "share" Icon at the bottom of the item. Done. Now my wife, my family, and my friends are all reading the same item if they're using reader. It shows up in their shared items list.

    Some of the feeds I subscribe to:

    garfield minus garfield - http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/rss
    Joystiq - http://feeds.joystiq.com/weblogsinc/joystiq
    Lolcats - http://feeds.feedburner.com/ICanHasCheezburger?format=xml
    The Daily WTF (worse than failure) - http://syndication.thedailywtf.com/TheDailyWtf
    The Truth About Cars - http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/?feed=rss2
    xkcd.com (webcomic, hilarious if you're a geek) - http://xkcd.com/rss.xml
    Bad Astronomy Blog - http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/feed/

    others (you can easily search these if you want to subscribe I don't have the feed url handy)

    Linux.com
    Slashdot.org
    Paul Daughtery's Blog
    Redleg Nation
    Chris Sabo's Goggles
    RulesofThumb.org
    Xbox360Fanboy
    ESPN.com
    Engadget
    Lifehacker
    National Geographic News
    fast cool cars (Top Gear's Blog)
    Television & Media (John Kiesewetter's blog)

    And now C Trent, Lance and Mo Egger ... welcome to the RSSOsphere boys.... ;)

     

    0 (0 Ratings)

    Thanks for explaining the RSS. I've seen it on my computer but didn't know what it was for. Sounds pretty cool!

    Chris in Cambridge
    June 23, 2008
    08:38 PM EST

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