Design-Design - Design and Designing For The Client

Manual

The traditional view of surfing the web is that a user looks at different Unique Resource Locations [URL]s or, to put it simply, visits different websites on the Internet to find out the latest information, updates and news from that site. This can take many hours of your week as you find the news page, maybe login or even refresh the current pages seeking the latest and greatest in your field of interest.

Automatic

Now reverse that idea and consider RSS feeds. RSS feeds transmit changes to content such as latest company news, latest world news from the BBC, latest images on Flickr and other relevant information to the feed you subscribe to. This will save you many hours of trawling through your favourite sources of information only to find that there was, essentially, nothing of interest or new.

Technical

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication [and can occasionally be know as Rich Site Summary]. It relies on the website in question having a suitable ‘Feed’ or file containing the information a Feed Reader can understand. The data in one of these Feed Files is usually in a special .XML format and contains a news title, summary and sometimes a thumbnail image to give the reader a suitable overview of the information they will be directed to. This is useful because a Feed Reader can easily compile a series of news titles into a very short amount of space for selection rather than the user trawling through page after page of old or irrelevant news.

If you are looking at a site that is compatible with a Feed Reader or Aggregator then you will see a link with this logo next to it [with the word 'subscribe'] or you will see the same logo in the URL bar at the top of the browser. Clicking on either will present you with the subscription window. If you really want to find out more technical details then Wikipedia’s RSS article gives a fairly accurate and useful summary.

Subscribing

If all this is sounding a little too complex – here is a suggestion: GIVE IT A TRY. Its easy to establish an RSS feed link especially if you are using Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer 8. It is recommended that you take the following steps to set up your Feeds:

1. Find yourself and easy-to-use aggregator. Google Reader does a good job of storing your feeds in one easy to manage area within your Google Account. To create an account [and a Google Account if you don t already have one] then go to the Google Reader Sign Up page. This will guide you through the process.

2. You will need to find yourself a website that has an RSS feed. This website has an RSS feed you can subscribe to and keep up with the latest news. To do this either click on this site’s feed link [or copy and paste www.design-design.co.uk/feed/ into your Google Reader account] and follow the instructions to save the feed to your browser window or Google Reader.

3. Login to your GOOGLE ACCOUNT > MY ACCOUNT > READER to see what feeds you have subscribed to and see the latest news.

4. If you know the address of the feed from other sites you can copy and paste this into Google Reader. If you want to try this – open a new TAB or browsing WINDOW and type in www.bbc.co.uk. You will then see the RSS orange feed link. Click on this and add it to your Reader account or a link in your browser favourites which will then update each time you open a browser window. One more useful tip is to organise your Feeds so that they appear on the main browser window by going to BOOKMARKS > ORGANISE BOOKMARKS > drop feed into BOOKMARKS TOOLBAR [Mozilla Firefox]