President's Corner: RSS_Newsreaders
By Bill James December 2004
Are you a News
Junkie that uses the Internet and wants to keep on top of
late breaking world events? If so, RSS can have a huge impact on how you stay
abreast of the news and information that interests you. Rather than going
through your browser's list of bookmarks every morning, you can let an RSS
aggregator or newsreader bring what's new straight to you. If this all sounds
too technical, don’t stop reading at this point because you probably have
already had some exposure to this process. Have you been 
curious
about the small orange boxes that you see on some Web pages that look like
this:?
First let’s attempt to define what RSS and XML mean. For RSS no one seems to agree what it means. Devised in 1999 by Netscape to gather content for its Netcenter portal, RSS is a dialect of XML. RSS is currently referred to as RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, or even Really Simple Syndication. The name really does not matter, because RSS can save you a lot of time.
Web designers and other information providers use RSS to syndicate news content, site updates, blogs, and all sorts of timely data, pushing it out to users who subscribe or opt in for the feed. Chances are you've been to plenty of sites that feature RSS buttons or links, but you either didn't notice or ignored them. XML is short for Extended Markup Language used in the development of Websites. XML Websites have very rich content and are also inter-active with the users.
With an RSS newsreader, you can add the site's RSS feed to your list of subscriptions, eliminating the need to visit the site regularly. Depending on settings at both ends, all the latest information from the site's feed will be pulled into your RSS newsreader. This data can take the form of headlines and summaries from which you can click over to the site, or of entire articles.
For the newshound, there are a multitude of readers available. I might add that ‘news’ are not the only sites that you can monitor. For instance PC Magazine displays the ‘XML’ rectangular. Any Website that changes and has been RSS enabled can notify you of any changes that have been made to their site. A list of readers designed for your operating system is available at this Website: http://allrss.com/rssreaders.html. A list of RSS feeds can be found here: http://allrss.com/rssfeeds.html .
Bill James is President of the Computer Club of Oklahoma City. Bill can be reached at james@qns.com