Since I just upgraded my photo album to a package that supports RSS feeds I thought I'd write an introduction to RSS for people who haven't encountered it before. If you're a web-tech expert, then this post is probably not going to be interesting to you.

If you're anything like me, you have a list of a few websites that you check every day. I call them my “daily fix”. Every day I fire up my browser and go to each one to see what's new. This is fine for a handful of sites that are updated daily, but there's a lot of interesting stuff out there on the internet. Daily browsing doesn't scale well if you want to keep up with dozens or even hundreds of websites. It also doesn't work very well if you want to follow a website that's only updated once or twice a month because you'll quickly lose the motivation to check in on it. RSS is a web technology that can help solve these problems.

What's RSS? To oversimplify, it's a format that a website can use to provide a compact digest of itself, called an RSS feed. For example, a news site might provide a list of headlines along with the first paragraph of each story. A photo album might provide a list of albums with a highlight photo from each. You'll often find a link to the RSS feed of a website cryptically denoted by a little orange box like this:


RSS


or this:


XML (RSS is an XML-based format.)

An RSS reader, or aggregator, is an application (either installed on your computer or on a website) that quickly scans tens or hundreds of RSS feeds and displays them for you in an easy-to-browse format. For example, here's a screenshot of NetNewsWire Lite, the RSS reader that I use:




On the left is a list of all the feeds I'm subscribed to. The upper-right pane is a list of “headlines” from the currently selected feed, which happens to be my photo album. The lower-right pane displays the “story” for the selected headline. As you can see (if you have good eyesight), it's easy to tell at a glance that Buy Blue has 15 new headlines but KernelTrap has none. If I were to select Buy Blue I could easily scan the headlines and decide if any of them were worth reading. Also, I will find out if my lab-mate Cristian adds any new photos to his photo album without needing to browse to it on a regular basis. The RSS reader allows me to focus on the content that I want to read without spending a long time browsing the web.

So now that I've told you what RSS is all about, I hope you'll download an RSS reader (Mozilla Thunderbird, for example) and subscribe to the feeds for my blog and photo albums!