Leveraging RSS Feeds Through Your Internet Connection
Enjoying affordable online access at home has completely changed the way in which we live. More than ever, we use the internet to keep up with current events, communicate with our friends and family, and purchase products. We also consume far more information than our parents did (or their parents before them). Indeed, there are billions of websites that offer a continuous stream of news, entertainment, personal meanderings, and other forms of content. The challenge is figuring out how to manage it. Enter RSS.
RSS (also known as Really Simple Syndication) feeds allow you to receive customized streams of content that you choose. For many people, these feeds represent the only way they can find the time to enjoy news, articles, and their favorite blogs. In this article, we’ll explore some of the content you’ll find online and explain how you can read it.
Types Of Content You Can Enjoy Online
Consider the types of information that you normally enjoy and the websites you visit regularly throughout the week. That might include popular news-related sites (i.e. CNN.com, NYTimes.com, etc.), blogs, videos on YouTube, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Each of these websites can deliver their content to you through RSS. In the case of sites that offer stories and articles on a variety of topics, you can customize the feeds to include only what you prefer.
To better manage the streams you’ll receive, it’s important to identify each source you intend to follow and its publishing frequency. Many of them will allow you to customize the stream in order to suit your appetite. For example, a popular blog with multiple writers might update over 100 times each day. In that case, having the option to receive a daily synopsis might be preferable to receiving a continuous trickle of items.
Offline Versus Online Readers
You’ll need a reader in order to read your RSS feeds. Some readers are designed to download content and store it offline for you. Others collect your subscribed content streams while you’re browsing and allow you to peruse them online. The most significant difference between online and offline readers is that the former lets you check your feeds from any computer. The latter requires you to use the computer to which you’ve downloaded the reader.
The online RSS readers offer a few additional features, which may be valuable to you based upon how you prefer to enjoy your feeds. For example, Google Reader allows you to mark up web pages included in the streams and share them with other people. Whether or not that is useful to you depends partly upon your browsing habits and the manner in which you network with others.
RSS feeds are an ideal solution for managing the information you want to read while not becoming overwhelmed in the process. When it first debuted, it was mostly used by people who were technically savvy. However, with today’s easy-to-use tools, RSS has become a simple information-gathering platform that anyone can leverage.
