Morning Discussion

RSS myths busted...

Due to the misinformation some of you seem to have about what RSS does and why you should or shouldn't use it, I thought I would take this time to write a little handy dandy post to maybe inform some of you, and possibly get some of you to use RSS or give them another try.

Let me first and foremost say, using RSS does not mean I don't end up visiting that site. I do. It does allow me to find (or skip) information quickly.

Google Reader is very good, and I will probably refer to it when I talk about some RSS reader specifics, if you already have a Google account you can setup a reader account at http://reader.google.com/ and if you don't already have a favorite RSS reader, then I would strongly suggest you use Google's.

Here you can see the basic layout of Google Reader:
http://shackpics.com/files/googlereader1_xde0uuve13mskp7nng6d.jpg

And here you can see what I see reading posts:
http://shackpics.com/files/googlereader2_iqj11kb5u0vhmv79wzt2.jpg

Obviously I am not getting just a sentence from the site. However, some sites don't include the whole post in their feed, only a teaser. Typically for these sites, by either the headline or the teaser I can tell if I want to go ahead and read the rest of the post. Most sites if the headline is interesting, and the first of the post is as well, I will open that post in a new tab (middle click the headline) and continue down the reading pane. As you pass a post, it marks it as read. You can also mark everything as read if you don't care or don't want to "catch up" I will sometimes do this for some of my "folders" of things I don't care to read a backlog of, namely weather and shack NWS, INF+, etc posts.

There is a way to quickly add feeds, and I like organizing feeds into folders. That way if I don't give a fuck about all the political stuff that happened over night, I will just mark the whole politics folder as read and move on.

Granted, RSS is not for everyone. I don't think I could live without it because I use it to pull in news, posts, and information from so many sites I don't even want to think about visiting each one on a daily basis to see what's new. Some sites have new content daily, or hourly. Some every few days or weeks.

Now, most of you who read this and made a new Reader account probably need some feeds to start playing with. Might I suggest these as adds to your reader:

HMWMGP:
http://blog.helpmewithmygameproblems.com/feed/
http://helpmewithmygameproblems.com/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss

Games:
http://blog.jeffgerstmann.net/feed/
http://www.playedpodcast.com/feed/
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MajorNelson

Shack related:
http://feed.shacknews.com/shackblog.xml
http://feed.shacknews.com/extras/shackcast/shackcast.xml
http://shackmap.com/shackrss/?query=&user=&type=n
http://shackmap.com/shackrss/?query=INSERT YOUR SHACKNAME HERE
http://www.shacknews.com/extras/atom_interesting.x

Thank you and have a wonderful time enjoying your new RSS enabled Interweb 2.5 experience.