RSS

Being quite an active netizen I have seen the RSS logos around on a lot of the sites that I visit, but I had never really stopped to investigate precisely what it meant. Today, prompted by Sham at work, I did some investigation and am happy to say I have stumbled on the world of RSS. Basically RSS is just a standardized feed of any given webpage, or infact any data really. It is best used with a RSS reader that basically allows you to periodically poll a site for an update and if so it will show you a summary (or in fact the full text its definable) and provide you a link to the full story. I did some research and the best one I have found yet for unix is Liferea which seems to have all the features that you could want and a decent interface. My only issue with it is that as a KDE user I had to install half of gnome to get it working, but it was worth it.

What makes RSS really powerful is just how many sites are now starting to use it. Chances are that your favourite web sites that change information on a regular basis have some kind of RSS feed, including big sites like cnn / bbc / smh etc.

A good introductory link that I have found which covers things like blogs and RSS. A more interesting blurb can be found at jwz's.

It is worth noting that Wordpress , the package I use to power this blog supports RSS feeds out of the box, so in fact you can subscribe to this blog and automatically see the updates as I type them!