Intro to RSS

This will be obvious to some readers, but for those of you who don’t know what RSS is, let me explain. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it allows you to easily track the activity of websites you’re interested in without going to the site every day to see if something’s changed. RSS makes it easy to follow a site that changes frequently, like a blog.

To make this work you need something called an RSS Reader. This is a piece of software that tells you when a site has changed. You give the RSS Reader the address of the “RSS Feed” for the site you’re interested in and from then on, the reader monitors that site, tells you when there’s been a new posting and gives you a summary of each new post. If you’re interested, you double click on the listing in the reader and it transfers control to your browser and opens the site so you can look at it normally.

I use a freeware RSS reader for OSX called Vienna. It looks good and is quite intuitive for Mac folks — a little like a cross between Mail and iTunes. It’s available here: http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php

Safari itself can also check RSS feeds for you, and so can Apple Mail. There are several websites that will check RSS feeds, as well.

Splice Here’s feed is this:
http://splicehere.wordpress.com/feed/

There’s also a feed for comments:
http://splicehere.wordpress.com/comments/feed/

In Vienna, click on the big plus sign at the bottom left corner of the main window and paste one of those URLs into the window that appears. That’s all there is to it. Keep Vienna open and it will check your subscriptions every day (or every hour) and give you a summary of everything that’s new.

To use Apple Mail (under Leopard), click the plus sign at the bottom left of the main Mail window and select “Add RSS Feeds…” Paste the RSS feed for your favorite site into the window that follows and click “Add.” New posts will be displayed under “RSS” on the left side of the Mail screen.