Tip 15: When really simple really is

The web has been around for a very long time now (technologically speaking), and sometimes I find myself sticking to the old ways just because that’s how I’m used to doing things. But sometimes something new comes along that changes everything and suddenly makes routine tasks faster and easier.

For example, in the 90’s it was hard to search the web. Once you found a site, you pretty much had to add it to your “Favorites” list just to find it again. After a while the Favorites list got bigger and bigger, and it was impossible to know if a site had new content, so it became necessary to go back to the favorite sites periodically and check them again. Considering the slow speed of a dial-up connection, something had to change. And it did.

Simply syndicate it

You may have already heard of RSS. It currently stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Early on it stood for “Rich Site Summary” and before that was “RDF Site Summary” (where “RDF” was geek-speak for “Resource Description Framework”).

In simple terms, RSS is a specification for summarizing a website’s contents. The information contained in an “RSS feed” typically includes a list of pages or articles the site contains. The file is a real-time snapshot of the website at the moment it is requested.

To use a website’s RSS feed, you need to “subscribe” to the feed first. Of course there are many ways to do that, but let’s look at the easiest, using Microsoft Internet Explorer. Again, all modern web browsers support RSS by slightly different means, so if you are using Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome or some other browser I’ve never heard of, the steps should be similar.

In the button bar at the top right corner of Internet Explorer, you’ll find the RSS button. The RSS feed button is normally grayed out. However if an RSS feed is available for that website or page, the RSS feed button turns orange and displays a “glint” indicating this is a new feed (new to you at least).

No feed available	RSS feed is available

If you click the little orange icon, your browser will navigate to the site’s subscription page. The page you see is actually generated by Internet Explorer, and it is displaying the contents of the feed file on the page.

As you can see in the image above, the RSS feed subscription page lists the name of the site in the yellow box along with a description of how feeds work. Below that box is a list of articles for the website. If you click on the “Subscribe to this feed” button, you get a dialog box asking you for details about what to name the feed (with the site name as the default) and where to file it. The latter option allows you to create folders within your feed list to keep them organized. But that’s a more advanced topic.

The last step is to click the “Subscribe” button to confirm the details, and you’re good to go. As the subscription dialog tells you, your computer is going to keep track of your subscriptions for you, so all you have to do is to check up on them.

O subscriptions, where art thou?

Now that you’ve subscribed to this column’s RSS feed, you are likely wondering how you check on that subscription. Glad you asked. This is where an “aggregator” comes in. An aggregator is a program that manages and displays your RSS feed subscriptions in a central and easy to access manner. There are more RSS feed aggregators (a.k.a. “news feed aggregators”) that you can shake a stick at, and feel free to take a casual look at Wikipedia for the full up-to-the-minute list.

IE7 Favorites Button	IE8 Favorites Button

Fortunately Internet Explorer (beginning with version 7) and the other big browsers are included in the list. This means that Internet Explorer provides a place for you to view and manage your feeds without having to leave the program. You’ll find this option when you click the star icon in the top left corner of Internet Explorer 7 or later. This opens the “Favorites Center” which consists of three tabs. You are likely most familiar with the “Favorites” tab, which displays the list of websites that you have added to your favorites list. The middle button is “Feeds” which is the one we’re going to discuss next. The third tab button is “History” which is a very useful feature, but we’ll have to defer discussion of that to another tip.

So here’s the beauty part of the feeds tab: when one of your subscribed feeds has updates you haven’t seen yet, the title of that entry appears in bolded text to distinguish that feed has having updated information. If you click on the the feed entry, the browser navigates to that page and the feed is marked as read. If you organize feeds into folders (as is the case of the provided-by-default “Microsoft Feeds” folder seen above), the folder name text will be bolded to catch your eye.

Feeds are great with 8

If you have updated to Internet Explorer version 8, you have another feature available to you called the “Favorites Bar”. It is enabled by default, and is easy to use. If you have a sharp eye you may have noticed that your Subscribe dialog window looked slightly different than it did in Internet Explorer 7:

If you check the “Add to Favorites Bar” option, a shortcut to the feed will automatically be added there. But never fear, if you didn’t check this when you subscribed to a feed, you can easily add it by hand. Open the Favorites Center and select the Feeds tab. Now right-click the specific feed entry to bring up its “context menu” (the context menu is a topic unto itself, so if you don’t understand follow along and we’ll cover that when we’ve got more time). Then click the “Add to Favorites Bar” menu option.

Once the feed is added to your Favorites Bar, you can manipulate it by right-clicking the feed icon and selecting some of the available options. I like to rename my feeds to conserve space on the Favorites Bar, but that is up to your own taste.

When a feed on your Favorites Bar has detected changes, it will blush orange for a few moments, and the text of the title will be displayed in bold as it was in the Favorites Center. If you click on the feed item, it will drop down a menu showing up to the last ten articles in the feed.

From there, you can select any item in the list. New or updated entries will also appear in bold text, so finding the changes is easy.

Other ways to aggregate

I’ve only brushed over the tip of the aggregator iceberg. If you use Microsoft Outlook 2007 or Microsoft Live Mail, your subscribed feeds are listed within those programs and show up as unread mail. Other programs deal specifically with managing large groups of subscribed feeds. Feel free to explore the other aggregators on your own if your browser doesn’t support your needs.

Next time we’ll run with scissors and eat some paste. See you then…