syndication
Syndication technology allows you to easily publish and read small summaries of web sites or pages. You need to use a specialized piece of software that reads syndication files in order to access web sites via syndication. The syndication file contains a summary of recently published or changed files (or articles, as is the case for most blogs).
When I originally wrote the previous paragraph, I wrote "RSS" instead of "syndication". RSS is the most common mechanism for syndicating sites. There are at least three versions of RSS that you'll encounter, but they all do essentially the same thing in somewhat different ways. RSS isn't new, but it's really blossomed over the last few years, and most blogging software supports it, as well as many web browsers. It's also not the only mechanism for syndicating web sites. There's another called "Atom" which you may also encounter. As far as most end users are concerned, the exact mechanism by which the web site is syndicated is mostly irrelevant.
This web site supports RSS in a couple of different ways. You can get an RSS feed for the website as a whole, or you can get one for my media recommendations (which are not included in the first RSS file, so if you want both, subscribe to both).
I subscribe to dozens of web sites via RSS. Reading their headlines via RSS allows me to skim them quickly... it also allows me to keep up to date on infrequently changing things like software releases, without having to remember to check back periodically, or have to receive email notifications about new releases. I even get RSS feeds of phone calls and weather conditions at home. It's a very helpful technology which allows me to process much more information than I could have without it.
Syndication works best when you use a reader regularly. If you try to use syndication only to read one or two web sites, I suspect you'll never get in the habit of using your syndication reader, and you'll be trading off the problem of remembering to check the web sites for remembering to use the syndication software. It's likely that most web sites that you read regularly have syndication feeds, and you'll likely save yourself a lot of time by reading them with syndication software instead of a normal web browser. To that end, I can recommend the following readers:
Cross-platform:
- Firefox - the latest web browser from the Mozilla Foundation. It's a great web browser, very flexible and extensible, and fast. Firefox has built-in RSS capabilities. When you browse a page with an associated RSS link, you'll see a feed icon at the right side of the address bar. Click on that icon and Firefox will offer to bookmark whichever feeds it finds on the page. The bookmark will then indicate how many new items there are.
- Bloglines - Bloglines is a web-based RSS reading and blogging service. They'll manage your subscriptions; you can organize your reading into folders. You can easily 'blog' in the most common sense of clipping articles that you're interested in and then publishing pointers to them in your Bloglines blog. I do blog there but mostly I use Bloglines for reading. They were acquired by Ask Jeeves a while back... I have to wonder what their financial model is, as I've never seen a hint of advertising on them. The benefits to using Bloglines are the ease of blogging and the fact that you have your RSS feeds available to you wherever you have an Internet connection. The downsides are that it's not as feature-rich as an RSS reader running on your computer would be, and that someone knows what you're reading. Two web-based alternatives to Bloglines are My Yahoo and Google Reader.
MacOS X:
- Netnewswire - a very well respected RSS reader. It comes in a "lite" version and a full-featured version. The lite version is free; the full-featured version is very reasonbly priced.
- Safari, the web browser that comes with MacOS X, includes RSS support under MacOS X 10.4 and later. Like Firefox, it will display an RSS icon at the right side of the address bar when there's an RSS feed present for a page or site. Click on that icon to subscribe to the feed.
- RSS Menu provides a compact interface to your RSS feeds in you rmenu bar. You can customize it to show the number of unread articles, and it can synchronize the feeds it displays with your subscriptions under Safari and your iTunes podcasts. I like it, although I find that it does crash once in a while and is a bit slow if you have it refreshing frequently.
Windows:
- Feed Reader - a free RSS reader that I have no experience with.
- Feed Demon - I used Feed Demon back when I was still Windows-based, and I was very happy with it. One drawback for you may be that it's commercial, but in my experience it was well worth the price.
- Internet Explorer 7 - Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been moribund for several years, but they've finally resumed development on it, and the next release (in beta testing as I write this) will have RSS support built-in.
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Last modified: Wed Mar 29 00:24:37 EST 2006
