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Written by Hugh Williams
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Monday, 10 November 2008 |
 If you are anything like me, you will have a large list of websites you visit daily in order to keep up to speed with things as they happen in our increasingly information rich world. This almost habitual behavior of visiting a wide variety of websites, such as the web 2.0 social networking site Facebook, the national news institution that is the BBC, or just a coffee break browsing YouTube, is often referred to as a "surfing pattern".
Up untill recently I would logically login to each of these sites individually, one after the other, or if I was feeling particularly adventurous, I would open several tabs in Firefox and click between them as and when I needed. However as you can appreciate, this process can take up a substantial amount of time, as I am sure many of you reading this will know! Which makes sense, if you consider the large amount of information you are having to take in from all these different sources.
I have always been happy with this arrangement, especially as an
undergraduate student, when I had plenty of time to spare, but recently
I have found myself having to miss out certain parts of websites, or
skip them completely, due to time constraints. This began to make me
wonder, surely there is an easier way? Enter RSS feeds! A pretty impressive and
innovative technology, of which I had not really taken much notice, held the
answer. If you havent a clue as to what an RSS feed is, please give our
simple explanation a read.
This realisation also tied in quite nicely with the arrival of my
iPhone, which has a brilliant free RSS feed reader available,
NetNewsWire which can be downloaded from the Apple Store easily and quickly. If you own a non-apple based mobile device, such as a blackberry, I suggest using the NewsGator Go! reader, or if you wish to use RSS Feeds on your home computer, FeedDemon does a very good job. This does however require that you have a NetNewsGator
account, again, free and easy to complete, that's sole purpose is to
allow you to synchronise all of your devices you wish to read RSS
Feeds on, essentially quickly and easily organising your daily surfing, as you will never ever find yourself reading something twice!
Now you have your devices setup, synchronised and ready to go with readers, you need some feeds to read! The easiest way of doing this, is by entering the addresses of the websites that you visit on you daily or weekly "surfing pattern" into your RSS reader, which should, as in Feed Demon's case, automatically search the website for any available feeds to which you can subscribe, for simplicitys sake, I suggest that you do this within your computer's reader, rather than your mobile device!
In order to round off this article, I am going to leave you with a few of my own personal favorites:
- HotUKDeals is a brilliant bargain hunting website, that is constantly updated by its thousands of viewers with the latest bargains, deals and voucher offers, the perfect candidate for an RSS feed, with its mountains of constantly updated information, provided in a quick and simple, easily digestible form...
- The BBC is almost a one stop shop when it comes to news and information relevant to you, and so there are literally thousands of feeds out there, but The Feed Factory is here to help you choose the right feeds for you!
- Lifehacker is a great resource for "getting things done" and as such has a wealth of relevant and up to date information regarding business, life skills and technology. It is definitely worth a read .
- The Motley Fool is a great financial advice website, whos purpose is to "Educate, Amuse, and Enrich" and that process is sped up through the use of their RSS Feeds.
- Wired is a technology and business oriented news service feeding an intelligent, discerning audience, and you will be one of the most intelligent if you are using their RSS Feeds.
I hope this list helps you get started in the world of RSS Feeds, or even just highlights a couple of sites you may not have visited before, and if you have any sites you feel I may enjoy, please get in touch, or even better, leave a comment below!
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