The Museum Of Modern Thinking

Like me, you’ve probably have a couple of sites you visit on a regular basis for news, information, free code that you can just drop into your app without crediting the author, that kind of thing I had more than a couple of sites to check, truth be told, and checking them on a daily basis was becoming a PITA.

Fortunately, RSS provides a way for sites to alert interested parties that their site has been updated. An XML file is published with a list of summary items containing a brief description of the new content, images, and links. An RSS reader checks this file on a periodic basis and alerts you to the fact that there is new content.

Other RSS readers are available, but after reading about Robert Scoble’s approach to RSS reading on Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week blog, I thought I would give Google Reader a try (because it’s what Robert Scoble uses – I’m such a fanboy).

Google Reader does require a Google account, but all that’s just an email addy and a password. Once you’ve signed up you can start adding RSS feeds. I found the easiest way of doing this is to surf to the site I’m interested in and click the “Detect Feeds” button on my browser. From there, I just copied the URL of the feed (e.g.  http://www.mkingscott.co.uk/feed/), flicked over to Google Reader, clicked Add Subscription, pasted the URL and clicked the Add button. Google Reader then goes off, verifies the url, and grabs the first few items in the feed.

Here’s where it gets really useful: it displays a list of all your subscriptions (to the RSS feeds), and a count of how many unread items there are in each subscription. You can choose to display all feeds, or just feeds with unread items. When you read an item and scroll past it, it’s marked as read. The really cool bit is it’s all done in-browser using AJAX (don’t ask). This means that as you’re reading, new content is highlighted in your subscription list as it comes in. In other words, you could leave a browser window open all day to keep an eye on your feeds – but then you’d never get any work done .

Go and give it a try, it’s cetainly changed how I get information. Be wary of having too many feeds though, try and keep it under fifty otherwise it’s just too much information. Google Reader has a stats page which can help you weed out your unread feeds if need be.