Managing Information and RSS feeds

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. I had noticed small orange boxes on web sites and blogs with XML or RSS written in them and when I clicked on them, my browser simply displayed an XML document and I did'nt quite know what to make of it.

Then recently, I began using Mozilla Thunderbird as my e-mail client. Thunderbird has built in RSS support so I decided to explore it. It turned out to be very simple. I simply created a news and blogs account in Thunderbird. Then I used the Manage Subscription option to subscribe to RSS feeds that I was interested in. I did this by specifying the URL for the feed. This is the same URL that is displayed in your browser when you click on those orange boxes I mention above.

Within minutes I subscribed to RSS feeds from NPR, BBC and some technology sites I am interested in. These feeds are essentially summaries of articles or news items at those sites. Thunderbird displays the title of the item much like it displays the subject of an e-mail. A short description of the item is them displayed in the frame where the body of an e-mail is displayed. There is also a link to the entire item so if I am interested in it I can go to the source and read the entire item.

With so much information out there, I find RSS feeds very helpful in keeping up with the information and quickly determining what is of interest to me so I may read about it further.

Many sites now provide RSS feed. Unfortunately my blog service provider, to the best of my knowledge, does not provide RSS capability else I would have provided an RSS feed for this blog as well!

Try RSS readers like Thunderbird. There are several other readers listed here.