- Image via Wikipedia
This post is in answer to the STC-issued RFP for a RSS tutorial. I personally think a RFP is overkill, and since the web is littered with useful info about RSS already, I put together this quick and dirty 101 tutorial. I wrote it in 10 minutes, so please pardon its 101ness.
STC members may have noticed that more and more information from the Society is now being published online. When once you had paper magazines and journals coming to your mailbox at home, you now have to obtain most of your information online.
Remembering to visit several different web sites for content can be a difficult task, and you may forget to visit some of these sites over time. So how do you ensure you always receive new content when it’s posted online?
Enter RSS (Really Simply Syndication). Nearly all web sites today use some form of electronic syndication to allow readers to subscribe to content. RSS is perhaps the most ubiquitous of these syndication technologies, and is a snap to get up and running with.
Now, before you can subscribe to content via RSS, you need a place for it to go. You need a mailbox, of sorts, where you can read the new content. This tool is aptly called a reader. Now, this isn’t the same as an email mailbox, but it’s close.
Perhaps the most common reader out there is Google Reader. It’s free, it’s online (so you don’t need to install anything and it’s available wherever you have web access, even in mobile form for all you smartphone junkies), and it’s simple to use. There are a plethora of reader tools out there, both online and ones that are installable, but for the purpose of this post I’ll discuss Google Reader.
If you don’t have one already, you’ll need a Google account. You can easily set one up here. Once you have one, head on over to http://reader.google.com and sign in.
Once you’re in, you’ll see that it looks a lot like an email client. Your tools and navigation run along the left hand side, and your feed content from the sites you subscribe to will appear in the large pane on the right.
Let’s add a subscription. Say you want to subscribe to STC’s Notebook. Hey, who doesn’t? The easiest way of doing this is to open a new tab in your browser and go to that site, leaving Reader open in another tab. Copy the URL of the web site (http://notebook.stc.org) and go back to Reader. Click the shiny Add a Subscription button, paste that copied URL right into the text field and click Add. The site will be listed in the left column, and your content feed will appear to the right.
Simple!
Now, those are the bare basics. If you’re interested in learning more about RSS and about readers, I’ve collected some links for you:
- More than you’ll ever need to know about RSS, from Wikipedia
- A quick, fun, and informative video introduction to RSS
- Getting Started with Google Reader
- A bunch of installable RSS readers
- A bunch of online RSS readers
Most if not all readers come with or link to documentation about how to use them. And, of course, there’s Google.
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