Untimely RSS Roundup

Perhaps surprisingly for a web developer, I’m a rather slow adopter of technologies. While I certainly believe in the power of the right technology and application to speed things up, I’m not such a firm believer in the ability of technology to simplify. New technologies simply shift labor from old tasks to new ones; for example, maintaining the new machinery that stamps out your widgets. The world is funny like that: we’re pretty good at devising things to keep us busy.

One technology that is pretty proven and popular these days is Really Simple Syndication, or RSS. RSS has been around for a number of years, getting pretty mainstream in late 2002. The RSS specification calls for a website to generate a particularly formatted XML file containing some of all of the website’s content. This XML file (called a feed) has a URL, like any other file online, which can be supplied to an RSS reader, which will download the feed, and parse it into an easily readable format for you. This isn’t too compelling for one website, but once you add a few feeds, suddenly you’ve got a whole corner of the Web available to you in one place.

If you browse the web to waste time, consolidating your various information sources isn’t going to be your cup of tea. But if you’re OCD about keeping up on everything else in the world, RSS can be a valuable tool in your hopeless quest. I’m now falling into the latter category again, and I’m particularly smitten with Google Reader, because there’s nothing to download, and it has a clever AJAX interface which saves new feeds and pulls down new content as you browse (the idea of which may have been pioneered by Humanized, maybe). I used Newsgator a few years back, and it’s also a quality platform.

Enough preface, here’s a few more links to explore:

• My friend Pete Freitag explores ways to lessen RSS’s bandwidth hogging ways.
• If you publish a feed, you can now use the Feedburner tracking tools for free.
• Semi-related: what makes for good pagination interfaces?