RSS
If you do not know what RSS stands for, or how it works, or what it's good for, be not alarmed! You're not the first, and you're certainly not the last.
Instead of spending time on what RSS stands for, or the origin of this powerful tool, let's look at how you can benefit from using it.
Get updates from your favourite sites immediately
RSS allows you to receive news articles from a site immediately (or pronto, or stat). In other words, if you subscribe to a site's RSS feed, you receive their latest news articles, as soon as it is posted.
Let's say you love reading articles on alistapart.com, but you hate having to go to their site to check if they have any new articles every so often. Also, you do not want to subscribe to their newsletter, because you don't want them to have your email in their database. So what do you do?
Consider this list of options:
- Ask a friend to subscribe to their email newsletter, and keep you updated
- Phone their offices and ask them to keep you updated by calling you weekly
- Do nothing and miss out on great articles
None of those options are good. They suck! So, subscribe to the feed, and keep in the loop of things. All the cool kids are doing it.
You need something to receive the articles with
Just like you need an email client to receive emails, so you also need a client for your RSS feeds, called a feed reader or feed aggregator. You get some fine feed readers out there, and they're free as well. Google has one, to name but one, and we all know Google is the new pink. So all you do is subscribe to one of these feed reader services. From there you can add feeds from your favourite sites.
I came across a sweet little feed reader. It's free, sits on your computer, and works much like an email client (such as Outlook or Outlook Express). It's called RSS Bandit, and it works beautifully. You can download it here. What's really nice about this feed reader, is that you can delete messages from your inbox once you've read them, or if you feel you don't want to read it. I hate an overly full inbox. Call it outboxolitis, but an inbox overflowing, sucks.
Receive RSS in your email inbox
Another option that I find highly appealing is subscribing to a feed that is delivered to your email inbox. The catch here is that you have to supply your email for this service. Is this bad? Could be, but if you trust the site, it shouldn't be. You then receive feed snippets from where you can click through to the site to read the full article.
What's the main difference between feeds and email from a user experience perspective?
A feed is a one way communication mechanism, whereas email is (or at least should be) two way (or more).
