Trying To Keep Up? You Need RSS / Atom Feeds
1. I use Firefox.
2. I really depend on the RSS icon in the address bar.
3. I understand they’re planning on removing it.
Scripting News: Dear Firefox, please keep the RSS icon
This is a giant step backwards for Firefox and for Web users in general. Already, Chrome does not have a built-in way to view and subscribe to feeds. Now Google is demoting the link for its Reader site from a top-level link for logged in Gmail users to something further down on the menu.
Now, I can actually see where moving that link makes sense. I don’t read my e-mail and feeds at the same time.
But what appears to be happening is that browser-makers and certain sites are making it more difficult to gather information online.
For those who do not understand feeds, let me explain. When you point your browser to a site like this, or perhaps a Belize real estate blog, there is a little orange icon up near the address bar in your web browser. If you click that icon, you get a view of that blog’s current content (as drawn from the site’s feed) along with some option for “subscribing” to the site’s content. What this means (and thus far, only Opera seems to do it correctly) is that the browser will check for new content while you’re doing other things.
So you don’t have to visit Macarena Rose’s Belize real estate blog every day, looking for new posts. Instead, your browser will alert you when there is new content. You can also set up Google Reader to do the searching. That way, when you log into that site, you see a list of updated items since your last visit.
There are also software applications that speed up the process of checking, downloading, and reading feed content. If you’re a Linux user, one of the best is Liferea. On Windows, RSS Bandit is said to be really good (I’m no longer a Windows user, so I can’t say for sure). And RSS Owl is great on any computer that has Java 1.5 or newer installed.
But there is a catch–and this is important–the site owner sometimes decides not to offer full articles in the feed. That means that I’ll see that WattsUpWithThat or Musings from the Chiefio has a new article, but if I want to read it, I have to go to that site. More often than not, I don’t have time to wait for the browser to open to that site, find the new content, and then read it. So I don’t.
Site owners: make sure you have a working feed, and that the feed includes full articles, so people who like your content do not have to return multiple times to find out whether there is anything new. Some sites have tried substituting feeds with announcing new items on Twitter. Twitter is a rushing river. If I’m not watching when you tweet, I will never see it. And I may not have time to go view it when you announce it anyway.
So let’s say you’re very interested in stories about the economy. Not just news stories, but discussion, opinion, and analysis of the information. You’re going to find that there is a wide variety of content, of quality, of depth, and of breadth. What you must do is find those sources that interest you, then subscribe to their feeds. No, you do not want to subscribe to e-mail updates. No, you do not want to manually return to the site every few days so you can find out whether there is any new content. You want to use a feed reader, so you can obtain the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of time.
