What I both love and hate about my life on the Internet is the crazy-making amount of information which lives just off the end of my fingers. Need a recipe for bananas foster — its out there. Need to know how to repair a Boeing 737 — its manual is probably in a database accessible via Google. Then there are the host of web pages that I want to read on a regular basis and never seem to have the time to get to. What’s happening with the Idaho Legislature? What are the headlines in the New York Times? What new software is available for my mobile phone?
This is where RSS comes in. RSS (opinions differ on what the acronym stands for) allows me to quickly survey many different web sites and get a quick overview of what is new on each. Instead of going to the BBC, the New York Times, Scientific American ETC and scanning past the ads and other things to see what’s new, I just open an RSS feed. This gives me a concise listing of the new information, usually sorted in reverse chronological order.
Both Firefox and modern incarnations of Internet Explorer have the ability to open RSS feeds. Here are links to more information.
- For a general introduction to RSS: http://rss.softwaregarden.com/aboutrss.html
- Here is the take on RSS from the perspective of Internet Explorer:http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/tour/rss/
- Finally, Here is how Firefox does things:http://johnbokma.com/firefox/rss-and-live-bookmarks.html Firefox chose to call their implementation of RSS “Live Bookmarks. Here is more information about additional options: http://mashable.com/2007/05/26/rss-firefox-guide/
Once you have RSS working, you will be able to know whenever something new is published in this blog. This is the subscription address for this feed: http://www.equaltext.com/equalities/feed/
Here’s hoping this makes your life on the net just a little easier!
Tags: Firefox, Internet Explorer, RSS, Technology