Helpful and thoroughly offtopic tutorial on RSS

I thought there might be some people who weren't really clued into the latest trends on the web, so this post is an attempt to point you towards some resources that will make the blogging assignments, and crawling the web in general, easier. (If you're the kind of person who needs to know up front why you should read this, i'm trying to save you the trouble of visiting each and every website you like to visit to see if they've updated.)

One of newer trends on the web is to make it easier to automate tasks, an effort generally referred to in the media (somewhat incorrectly) as Web 2.0, or less commonly (and more correctly) the Semantic Web. Towards that end, many websites publish something called RSS or Atom feeds, which are specially formatted text files that typically list the latest updates to the site. Some sites, such as the Huffington Post, publish multiple feeds that serve different purposes (e.g. a feed for news, and a feed for new blog posts.)

Using these feeds, software can collect and organize the updates in a way that helps keep you from suffering information overload. Think of it as news clippings. Its like the software is some little guy living in a box next to your desk going through all your favorite magazines and newspapers, clipping out the articles you'll want to read, then placing them neatly in little folders on your desk for you to read at your leisure. Its a great way to skim through a lot of information quickly to find what's relevant to you, and many software packages allow you to specify criteria that filter articles, so you only see articles that include the word "economics".

There's literally dozens of programs and websites you can use for this; it seems the "in" thing to do in the geek crowd these days is write what you think will become the world's greatest RSS newsreader. I personally haven't succumbed to that impulse--I'm kind of lazy so i'll let someone else do the heavy lifting. So far my favorite software to use is something called GreatNews thats pretty easy to use, and is a really small piece of software that you can just unzip into a directory and run from there, which means you can easily stick it on a USB keydrive that you always have with you. (Just unzip it straight to the USB drive) Alternatively, there are several websites that you can use for the same function, such as NewsGator, which is accessible from any web browser with a live connection.

Once you've selected a piece of software, the next tricky part is populating it with the feeds, which is usually a somewhat time-consuming task of going to your favorite sites, finding the link for their RSS feeds, copying that to the clipboard, pasting it into the software... this is the part where having geeky classmates comes in handy. You can download an OPML file from my website that has 20+ feeds for our class, at http://www.karmajunkie.com/microfeeds.opml. In GreatNews you can import it directly using the url by going to Tools, Import OPML/XML file (hint: copy the url to your clipboard first, and GN will realize what's going on and automatically select the right options for you.) You can use the same OPML file with NewsGator and most other RSS readers.

Once you've got it installed/running, you can check it every so often to see which of your sites have updated. Tip for those of you who spend way too much time on myspace: myspace blogs have RSS feeds; copy the link up at the top of your friends main blog page (the one with all their entries) then Add a feed in GN using that url, and voila, GN will tell you when they've updated their blog.