Musings of a Drunken Monk: Individual Entry Archive

I've occasionally expounded on the benefits of RSS feeds in my news section, but for those of you who are still in the dark about what RSS really is, here's a little "tutorial" on how to get started in the wonderful wide world of syndication.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication, not Really Sexy Sluts as Dan suggested) is a way for you to aggregate a whole bunch of information into one point rather than having to go search all over the internet for it. Any webpage that is syndicated (has an RSS feed) will send updates to whatever program you choose as your "News Aggregator." The Aggregator will be your new point where all of the news that you have linked to (via the RSS feeds in pages) will gather. Get it? So for instance, in my aggregator, I have BBC World News, Boston.com news, New York Times, Ryan's Blog, Boing Boing Blog, Slashdot, and a whole veritable assload of other feeds. Instead of having to navigate all over the www and find all the headlines I want, I have everything I want in my aggregator. The best part is that I don't have to wait for pages to load or read articles I don't want to read. I simple text headlines that load in no time flat as soon as they are put into the feed, and I read whatever I choose.

That was probably confusing. Let's learn by example, shall we?

Say you think my page is downright kickass and you want to know whenever I update (which, admittedly, in the past was rather ... uh ... infrequent but is now more frequent than anyone thought possible).

• 1) Go download and install a news aggregator client like SharpReader or NewsMonster or any one of the other million aggregators out there. Unfortunately, SharpReader (like many Windows aggregators for some reason) requires the .NET framework from Microsoft, which is a 20MB download in itself. NewsMonster on the other hand, requires Mozilla, whose Firefox project I've been pimping on my website for a while anyway. As I said there are plenty of other aggregators out there. I use SharpReader, personally.
• 2)

  There are other ways people choose to display RSS feeds. Ryan displays his feeds like this:

  

  Most commonly, RSS feeds will show up as an orange XML icon, something like this:

  

  For any one of these display methods, what you need to do is get the URL of that feed. So you can right-click on the link/icon and choose "copy link location" or however it is worded in your browser. You may also click on the link and then copy the URL from the addressbar in your browser.
  

• 3) Now open your aggregator and look for a section that has "address" or something like that, and then a field where you can enter text. In SharpReader it looks like this:

  

  Paste into this field the link that you copied above. If you hit enter, you will see the current headlines for that site. Somewhere in your aggregator there will be a "subscribe" button. If you hit that, you will be subscribed to the feed, and you won't need to do this process again. Every time you look in your aggregator, you'll have new headlines (if any have been made)!

  Now go out and start feeding, Soldier!

  P.S. the feed on my site is http://www.shock-e.com/index.xml
  Copy and paste into your aggregator, and you're set.