Creative and Effective Ways to Use RSS Feeds

Mar 09, 2014 Alessandro Zamboni Training 4

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How much time did you spend on the internet today? Were you on a computer or a mobile device? How many times did you see the icon for RSS feeds?
Oh you know they’re there. You’ve seen them but probably you never know quite what to do with them. You can try to do research, but if you’re non-technical, almost all the available articles will pretty much turn your brain to mush.

Quick and simple explanation. What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Yes, it’s not really simple to understand initially, but I didn’t name it, okay? Now this is what it was meant to do: it’s supposed to be an easy way to distribute a list of headlines, updates and sometimes even content to a large number of people.
People are usually interested in a wide variety of websites with continuously changing content. Repeatedly checking every website for something new can be tiring. That’s where RSS feeds come in.

So it’s like the newspaper boy taking out all the headlines from the paper and pasting them together in a way that’s easier to read. Then he’d photocopy the entire thing and deliver it all to everyone on his paper route. And he’ll do it every time there’s something new. Only there’s no paperboy. It’s the computer programs doing the organizing.

A website author maintains a list of notifications. If you’re interested in finding out the latest, you just need to click on this RSS feed. Computer programs will then check the RSS feeds of the other websites you care about, access those feeds and organize all the combined results for you.

The Other, More Creative Ways to Use RSS

Is that all? Well, that’s what it was created for. What else do you want? Okay, some people did find a few more uses for it. And here they are:

• RSS Via Mail – if you’re familiar with email get to know how to get RSS feed updates in real time. If you’re the type to obsessively check your email before anything else, try BlogTrottr. It takes any feed and forwards it to your email in real time.
• Twitter Feed – This is a free service every tweep should have. You can set it to track several RSS feeds and send updates to your Twitter account. You can even set up a Twitter account for your blog and have tweet all your blog feeds so others can follow it. So go straight to TwitterFeed.com.
• Interactive Timeline – Dipity’s RSS feature lets you create and embed an interactive timeline in minutes. All you need to do is copy the URL of the RSS feed and select RSS as your input source.

These are just some of the creative uses for RSS. No doubt when you start using it, you’ll find a few more. Don’t be scared to try it out, after all it was meant to make your life easier!

Thanks so much and see you soon,
Alessandro Zamboni

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