Yzabel / July 26, 2005

There used to be this mysterious little word, “RSS”, which meaning I couldn’t understand… However, now that I’m myself more used to the world of blogging and of reading news slightly more often than on a sporadic basis only, I found that these weird entities of “feeds” are almost a necessity to keep track with everything; bookmarking one’s favorite blogs in a browser can only take you that far.In a nutshell, feeds are files that are generated in the background and gather data everytime a blog, news source or similar website is updated. Not every blog will have a feed, mind you, but with those that do, it’s quite convenient, since it hands the readers a quick and convenient way to keep up to date with the blog, instead of having to bookmark and manually check it. What may seem like an easy and normal behavior when you read two blogs only becomes a hassle when you want to check a half hundred of them. Or more, way more.So, each time you see these cryptic acronyms of “RSS” (Really Simple Syndication), “Atom” and other “Syndicate this site (XML)” links, these are feeds. What you need next is an aggregator – in other words, a tool that will keep all your feeds in one place, and will check them regularly and warn you when they get updated. This basically comes down to two types of readers: offline and online ones.Offline newsreaders:These have to be installed on a computer. Strong point: they let you read the feeds’ content offline if you need to. Weak point: if you’re often on the move and want to access your feeds from everywhere, this won’t work. Some of them are standalone software, some others are installed and read through a web browser, such as Newsmonster. Me being a Windows user, I’ve of course tested a few on this platform only, my current favorites being FeedReader and BottomFeeder. There are other free ones, and there are paid ones too. One blog entry wouldn’t be enough to detail them all, thus, if you want a more exhaustive list, Wikipedia has a nice entry on news aggregators. The two I’ve listed here are good enough for starters, and they’re free.Online newsreaders:These are the web-browser based ones. Find a service that suits your needs, create an account, login, add your feeds: you can now access them from any computer. The first one I had ever tried was Bloglines; however, I now prefer Rojo. Here also, there are way more than these. Like the rest, they’re meant to be tried, and kept according to each user’s convenience. If, like me, you’ve been using an offline reader but considers switching to, or simply adding, an online one “in case of”, make sure that you can export your feeds’ OPML or XML file from the first, and import it in the second. This will avoid many headaches.No need to say that I absolutely dig out when someone sets a feed for their blog, as it has made keeping track and in touch so much easier. Truth be told, I’m of these people who don’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to create a feed for their blog. There are reasons to this, that is.To be noted, too, that Blog*Spot automatically generates an Atom feed for the blogs they host. This is something I discovered by chance quite some time ago, and it’s useful to know everytime I want to follow a blog hosted there and that at first doesn’t seem to have a feed. Normally, the feed can be found at a URL looking very much like this: http://nameoftheblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml.