One of the main reasons I decided to take blogging a bit more seriously is that I thought of it as a more effective way to stay in touch with friends, family, acquaintances, and teachers than maintaining several email lists. There are many reasons why blogging is better, but the most important is RSS.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask. Many news sites offer what are called RSS feeds for their news, or for types of news (such as Sports, International, etc.), and all blogging platforms (e.g., Movable Type, livejournal, Blogger, Wordpress, Typo) provide at least some of their content in RSS feeds.
One good way to think of RSS is to think of it as the dynamic portion of a site’s content being syndicated without the rest. Just like a columnist gets syndicated in many different newspapers, an RSS feed can be used to repackage information from any site that carries a feed. (NB: Because I plan on releasing most of my content under an attribution-only Creative Commons license, once I do so, anybody who wants to will be able to republish my stuff as well as repackage it).
“So why would I want to repackage this content? Why can’t I just bookmark the site and load it up whenever I want to see what’s new with you?”
I’ll give you a list of answers:
- Because you have no idea when I’m going to put news up. It may that I have nothing worth disrupting your busy schedule for several months at a time (you should only be so lucky). Other times I’ll have news up constantly (e.g., if I’m at a conference). RSS allows you to put all your news into one category and read the latest news from all your favorite news sources when you feel like reading news. All you need is an “RSS aggregator.”
- Because you can’t trust me not to harass you or not take your email address off my list. RSS is anonymous in that I don’t know (unless you tell me) that you’re subscribing to my feeds. Moreover, any “RSS aggregator” that you use will allow you to unsubscribe from a feed just as anonymously.
- Because you can pick and choose which parts of what I have to say you’re interested in. Wordpress, the blogging software that I use, provides RSS feeds for categories, so if you’re only interested in what I have to say about chess, you can easily just subscribe to those posts where I write about chess (more on how to do this later). En même temps, si vous ne vous intéressez qu’aux postes qui soient en français, Wordpress vous offre ce choix. (I hope I got that right).
- Because you can pretend like you care about me so much that you obsessively check my web site. As you get more news through RSS (The New York Times, BBC News, Le Monde, even The Town Talk all offer feeds), you’ll find yourself checking for updates on your feeds more often. This means that increasingly, you’ll see my posts right after they’re written, which means in turn that you can be the first to comment. This will make me happy, because it means a) that somebody actually commented on what I’m writing, and b) that somebody took my advice and used RSS to stay up to date with me.
- RSS feeds for comments (see the very bottom of the page) allow you to track the comments on a given post without having to reload the page every hour.
So how do you look at your feeds? Well, the easiest way to do it is through your email using an RSS to email service like the free RSSFwd (free both as in beer and as in speech). RSSFwd will simply forward articles from an RSS feed to the email you choose. The service is free, you can unsubscribe (anonymously) any time you want, and they’ll never sell your email address (they’ve never sold mine). To start, simply go to their web site, type in the URL of the feed (for example, the URL for the feed that will give you all my posts, is http://blog.scottcaplan.com/feed; the text is not a link so that you can copy and paste it easily)
If you’re looking for more control over how you view your feeds, you can use an RSS Aggregator or client. On my Macbook (yes, I’m one of those), I’m using NetNewsWireLite (which is free as in beer but not as in speech), and I love it. You can also use an online service such as BlogLines or GoogleReader (what I used to use).
That’s pretty much it for now. If you have to know more about RSS, you can check out the Wikipedia entry. If you’re interested to see what kinds of categories of mine you can add to your list of feeds, check out my Categories page.
