Saturday, August 2, 2008

In which RSS leaves me ReSSt deprived

A week ago, I figured out how to use RSS feeds. And dear God, I've hardly come up for air since. My "trends" page says I've read 7239 items in those seven days. To be fair, it's more like I've skimmed over 7239 headlines; I have probably actually read only one in ten of those items. But the efficiency of RSS over browsing is immense: everything gets compiled on one page, so you don't have to wander from site to site to see what's new. I have said several times I like newsletters in my e-mail. I like RSS feeds even better.

I just need to set aside a little time for, you know, little stuff like sleeping and eating and breathing. But I think all that trivia is less important than keeping up with a dozen newspapers and 70 or 80 blogs.

2 comments:

Distributorcap said...

i wish i could figure out how to use the RSS -- and place you can send me for instructions

Lockwood said...

Hey DCap, Thanks for stopping by and leaving the comments! If you use Gmail, open up your inbox, and along the top you can see calender, documents, etc. Click on the "Reader" tag. Reader is just another word for RSS organizer. Many sites have buttons that hook you up, others you just need to copy the site URL into the box that opens when you click "add subscription." For still others, clicking the RSS button will take you to a page of html gibberish- for those pages, again, just copy the page address into the box that opens for add subscription. I'll look around and see what else I can find. I know I've seen several places that listed RSS software, but once I realized it came with the Gmail account, I didn't look at anything else. I will say that it's very intuitive once you get started.