TeachOIT: a Blog for People Who Teach with Technology

In a perfect world, updates from all your favorite news websites and blogs would appear instantly in one place, ready for you to access.  You wouldn’t have to hunt.  It would be like getting your meals delivered from the best restaurants in town, everyday.

I’ve often wished for just such a service.  And then I found it…right under my nose.  It’s called an RSS reader, and you’ve probably seen everywhere the little orange squares that signal its feeds.

We’d like to take away some of the mystery from RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication) and get you to try it out!  You’ll wonder how you lived without it.

Here’s a brief summary of how it works: most news sites and blogs generate constantly updated “feeds” of all their latest content.  An RSS reader tracks your favorite feeds and delivers them to you in one location.  Think of it as an email inbox filled with your very own, personalized Web content.  Just imagine… no more checking the same websites day in and day out to see if anything new has popped up.  And you’ll never miss a thing.

For example, in my RSS reader, I am tracking the New York Times‘s “Most Emailed Stories,” my best friend’s blog, the comments my students post on our course website, and (of course) the TeachOIT blog.  As soon as a student posts a comment or another story moves into the NY Times‘s most emailed list, it appears in my reader — complete with a description (and sometimes the full text), a link, and an option to share by email.

Although there are many RSS readers available, I use Google Reader because it is straightforward and requires no download.  All you need to do is create a free Google account (which also gives you access to Google’s email, photo, calendar, and other services).

Once you have set up your reader, you can start adding “subscriptions” to your favorite websites by clicking on the site’s RSS link (which usually appears like this: ) or you can add the site’s URL directly in your reader.

And don’t forget: if you have your own UMass Blog, you can create a visible link to your blog’s feed to help your students and colleagues subscribe to your posts.  Under the Design tab, click Widgets and then add Meta if you have not already.  When you visit your blog, you should now see a link for “Entries RSS” and “Comments RSS” on the side menu.  Visitors can now subscribe to your blog in the manner outlined above.

That’s it!  Turns out, RSS really is Really Simple.

RSS is a rather important web technology that powers many other Web 2.0 tools. You may have seen the RSS logo (that orange box with little waves in it) or heard the term, but perhaps you aren’t sure quite what it means, or more importantly how can it help you?

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Once you get interested in following specific news sites or blogs (such as this one), it takes extra time and attention to remember to check in to look for new posts. RSS allows you to subscribe to the site and receive updates as soon as they are posted (which is great if you follow many sites), but this typically involves using special reader sites or software. An alternative is an RSS forwarding system that sends new posts directly to your email address. One such service is RssFwd

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 (from the April 2007 Emerging Technologies and Pie Presentation)

Audio Episode: RSS

RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”, among others) is a process that allows people who want to keep track of new content on a site to “subscribe” to the site and receive updates automatically when new information is posted. RSS also allows content providers to “syndicate” their content, pushing updates out to subscribers simply by posting new information.

Although current tools automate the process, the system behind this is the posting and updating of a text file, called a “feed”, that follows a standardized form (the RSS Specification) for describing updates or episodes. When someone wants to “subscribe” to a site, they simply copy the link to this file and insert it in the software that they use for reading feeds. Because the RSS specification is not proprietary, there are many varieties of tools that can read, display and organize content from RSS feeds.

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