About RSS

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One of the biggest development of 2005 was the widespread use of RSS feeds. What is an RSS feed? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a way of getting content where you want it when you want it. RSS is available in 3 versions, and it also has a competitor called Atom, but all of them boil down to more convenience for you.

Here’s how it works: Many content publishers provide RSS feeds. This includes the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNN, and others. Most bloggers also provide RSS feeds; it’s automatically handled by most blogging software. Each time these newspapers or bloggers publish a new article or post, the RSS feed is updated to show the new article. In this way, an RSS feed serves as a pipeline to the latest content.

Here’s where you can use RSS feeds:

1. Firefox. The Firefox browser has an option called Live Bookmarks. Whenever you browse in Firefox to a web site or blog that offers an RSS feed, an orange “wave” symbol will appear. (It’s next to the URL in Firefox 1.5 or in the bottom right corner of Firefox 1.0.) You can click the orange symbol to subscribe to the feed. A folder of bookmarks will be created, and each time the content changes, the bookmarks will be changes to match.

2. My Yahoo. Many of you may have a My Yahoo page, a customizable home page that lets you display personalized weather, news, TV listings, and other content of your choice. As of recently, My Yahoo will let you add any RSS content to your My Yahoo page. If, for instance, you have a friend who writes a blog, you can add his RSS feed to your My Yahoo page and see new posts from his blog appear there.

3. Standalone RSS readers. If you want to pay attention to several RSS feeds, you might like using a standalone RSS reader. A good free reader for PCs is FeedReader (http://www.feedreader.com/). For Mac, a good one is NetNewsWire Lite (http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/#lite). These programs allow you to subscribe to several RSS feeds and will then notify you of fresh content.

Here are some RSS feeds you might like:

* Recent Changes from MormonWiki.com: http://www.mormonwiki.com/mormonism/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss

* The Church in the News (articles linked to from lds.org): http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheChurchInTheNews

* The online version of the Church News print publication (requires subscription): http://feeds.feedburner.com/LDSChurchNews

Once you use RSS feeds, you’ll find it much more convenient to get the news and information you want when you want it.