RSS feeds…
Acronyms: tools of the devil
Sometimes acronyms stand for something that leaves a life long impression on you: PBnJ. Sometimes they stand for something childish: ABC gum. Sometimes they make you puff out your chest: USA! USA! USA! Sometimes they really don’t mean much of anything: RSS.
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. Where they got that, I have no idea. But RSS is here to stay in any case. It is also probably the most useful thing you aren’t using.
As you mentioned, RSS doesn’t really mean much, so what does it do?
Imagine each morning that you wake up and grab the newspaper. Instead of having a Sports section with ever sport and every team listed, you had a newspaper that had only the sports you cared about and only your favorite team. The Classifieds section only listed ads for a used digital camera. The Politics section didn’t exist because you could really care less about politics. Not only that, but it contains articles from more than your local paper. It includes magazines, short stories, and information about local concerts.
Now imagine as you read this newspaper, you whip out a giant, delicious smelling permanent marker and X out all the articles that you’ve read. If you find something extra cool, you can save it for later to show others.
Alright, this is starting to make sense. But carry on.
Let’s look at the picture below:
I use Google Reader, because it has a ton of features (feed popularity, time since last post, average posts per day), it is available anywhere you have internet (including your cell phone), and it has Google Search so you can find that article about how to remember the names of the various Teletubbies.
Above, in the left area of the reader are three sections. The All Items section can be expanded to reveal the Trends page which shows things like how many articles you read a day, what time of day you read, and other various statistics. The Friends’ Shared Items contain things that your other friends who use Google Reader find interesting. The last section contains all your subscriptions. You can order them however you want: alphabetical, according to the type of feed (mine is in categories like Tech, Friends, and Television).
Over to the right side, you can see some posts that I was in the midst of reading. The top one has a light gray border indicating that I’ve read it. The lower one has a blue border indicating it is currently being read. As I scroll down each post gets marked read. These keeps me from having to figure out, ‘What was the last post I read?’ next time I head over to one of the tech sites I read that posts about 50 articles a day.
A couple of options are available for each post: you can add a star if you want to come back to that post later, you can share with your friends, keep it unread, or change or add a category for this post.
Awesome! I just set up a Google Reader account! Its empty. 
Don’t fear. Adding feeds is easy and can be accomplished a number of ways. Above “All Items” you might have noted a Add Subscription button. Since this IS a Google product you can just enter a term and it will find blogs and sites that are related to the term. You can also put in the website address such as typing in ‘http://www.thedigitante.com’ and hitting enter. But perhaps the easiest way is to click the little orange button that you may have seen around the internet that look like this :
The following are some of the feeds that I subscribe to. You can try them out by either searching for them in the “Add Subscription” box in Google Reader or you can visit the links below and search for the orange stripy button seen in the image above:
- Comics – Basic Instructions
- Information – Google Reader blog
- Photos – Heidelberger Paper Indianapolis photos
- Food and Travel – Weird Meat
That sounds great, but I’m still lost.
Humans are creatures of habit. When we start off checking our Bookmarks at the top of our browser everyday, we tend to continue that way.
The instructions above are going to save you tons of time, but only if you can actually implement them. For a novice just getting into the internet, the instructions contained here may be a bit much. However, my whole purpose for creating this blog and business is to share my knowledge with those around me. If you don’t think you can handle getting a system like this set up, feel free to visit The Digitante home page and send me an email or give me a call. I would be more than happy to walk through these steps in front of your computer with you.
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