RSS: Tech Tuesday

Frustration can work both ways. Talking about the internet with some classicists can be difficult when I step down the explanation of what I’m talking about, then simplify it again, then discover that the didn’t realise email worked over the internet. At the same time talking to digital natives can be confusing with a stream of bizarre initials and there’s not always an easy reference. So what I’ll have a go at is putting together some posts on basic internet concepts and sites. I’ve run into incomprehension talking about Creative Commons, Flickr, Twitter, Blogging and SQL. A series of posts, eventually compiled into a Lulu book might help with that. But where to start?

After email, the next key internet technology for me is RSS. What the letters RSS stand for is debatable. The favourite is Really Simple Syndication. That doesn’t matter because it’s not the initials that matter about RSS. It’s what you can do with it. The killer app for RSS is that it saves you time. I don’t know exactly how many websites I check each day. Well over three hundred. The reason I can do that is that I tend not to read from the web, I read RSS. RSS is a way of formatting the content of a website to strip out all the elements of style and navigation that usually appears on a web page. Typical RSS feeds look really unfriendly to human eyes. Here’s an example.

Why make a website look worse? RSS feeds follow common standards, so while the content might change, articles and titles always appear in the same place. It’s a pain for humans to read, but it makes it very easy for computers to read – and that’s what makes them so useful.

I’m a fan of Northstate Science. Unfortunately it’s not been updated for nearly a year. I don’t know when or even if it will be updated again. I could check every day, but that’s going to take time and effort. Instead I use an RSS Reader to read the website’s RSS feed. It checks to see if the content has changed. If it has, then it shows me the new content. If there’s no change I don’t see it. The cost in time of following a website that doesn’t update is zero, so it becomes very effective if you follow sites that don’t add something new on a daily basis.

How would you use RSS? In the past I’ve tended to use NetNewsWire, a free program for the Mac from Newgator. They also make a windows program called Feed Demon. These are programs that will sit on your computer like an email program and read RSS feeds for you and highlight new items. I say in the past, because these days I spend more time on the web on mobile devices than my home computer. Now I’m reluctantly using Google Reader and Byline. The advantage of doing this is that if I read something on Byline, then it disappears from my unread items list when I use my home computer and vice-versa. I could use Google Reader for free on my phone rather than Byline, but I wouldn’t recommend that because it’s awful.

To read items I open up Google Reader or Byline and get a menu something like the above. This image is a list of the new stories in my Clio folder, which tends to be History, Classics and Archaeology. I tap one of the stories and can read the article with minimal formatting. There are some disadvantages to this. I didn’t realise Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory had a rather swish template. He’s changed it again alas, but you miss this if you read via RSS.

How do you get RSS feeds into your reader? The answer is usually to look for an icon like the one on the right, or else for something similar in your address bar. Clicking on it will usually take you to the RSS feed. If you’ve got an RSS reader installed something nifty might now happen. Feeds tend to have addresses feed://address-here rather than http://address-here. That feed:// protocol tells your computer to open up your RSS reader to access the feed. Signing on to a feed is called subscribing, even though no money changes hands. If you decide that you no longer wish to follow a feed you unsubscribe, following the instructions in your feed readers help file. My guess would be right-clicking on a feed and clicking unsubscribe from the menu. Subscribing to a feed in Google Reader can be more difficult. Google provides a bookmarklet which you can use to subscribe to feeds. That assumes you know what a bookmarklet is – I’ll blog on that in a fortnight.

Once you have the reader set up with feeds for the sites you’re interested in, you just open up the reader rather than visit all the sites to see what’s new.

Another advantage of RSS is that it allows websites to exchange content with each other. If your life is so bereft of excitement that you want to follow mine, you can find it at http://friendfeed.com/alun. What this page does is gather together things I put out here, or on Flickr, Twitter, YouTube or Intense Debate amongst others and pull them into one feed. I then follow other people’s feeds see what they’re bookmarking or talking about. If that’s all a bit confusing Maia Atlantis also reads RSS feeds to pull together dozens of blogs into one river of ancient discussion. I’ll keep referring back to RSS in other posts. In some ways it’s the strong that ties some of the web’s niftier applications together, which is why I started with it first.

To give you two feeds to start you off, there’s http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/feed/ which is the feed for this blog’s posts and http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/comments/feed/ is a feed for the comments. If you want to follow the comments on just one pst on any WordPress site sticking feed/ on the end of any post will give you a comments feed for that one post. You no longer have to keep visiting the site to see what’s new, and it also works for categories and tags too. All Tech Tuesday posts will be listed at http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/tag/tech-tuesday/ and a feed for just these posts will be at http://archaeoastronomy.wordpress.com/tag/tech-tuesday/feed/

If you want a more visual demonstration, here’s a video RSS in Plain English from the Commoncraft show, which says pretty much the same thing.

If you have any other uses for RSS feeds, or recommendations for better readers, then please leave a comment below.