Stay on top of things with rss

If you are blogging on a specific subject, you probably look at other blogs within your niche, and you should. Following other blogs is a good way of keeping up with industry specific news and it can give you ideas for new posts on your own blog. Keeping up with what others are writing can be a very time-consuming task though. You don’t know when other blogs post new content, so to really stay on top of things, you’d have to visit each site a couple of time a day to check.

There’s a better way though, say hello to our friend the rss feed. If you are blogging, there’s no doubt that you have seen this term before, about every blogging platform has rss feeds integrated into the software. Still many beginning bloggers don’t know what an rss feed is or how to use it. The rss feed is the best thing since sliced bread!

The rapid rise of blogs, and rss feeds, only a few years ago, might make you believe that rss is one of the hip inventions of the 21st century. Truth is, that the technique has been around since the 1960′s. Like most things computer related, rss’ roots lie at IBM. But let me not bore you with a history lesson, nor the technical details of the rss feed. Let’s just take it’s working for granted and see how we can make use of it.

Without getting into the technical details, let me quickly give you an idea of what an rss feed is. Simply put, the rss feed makes the content of a website available in a standard way. The key word here is content, the feed doesn’t contain the layout of the website or the ads you see when visiting the site, although ads can be integrated into rss feeds as well. An rss reader can read the contents of multiple rss feeds and display them to you. This way you can keep track of new posts on multiple blogs from within a single web page or application.

If you want to know which rss reader is best for you, I’m not the one to ask. There are many readers available, online applications as well as stand-alone programs. I use Google reader but similar services are available at other sites. I prefer the online rss reader because it enables me to access my feeds from any computer with an internet connection.

The Google reader serves my needs, so I have not tried other applications yet. If you want to see some other rss readers available, Life Hacker posted a list of their visitors favorite rss readers a while ago and Daren has also asked his visitors what they use.