Getting Started with RSS: The Fifteen-Minute Tutorial

From Free Range Librarian
Daily meditations on librarianship, by K. G. Schneider
November 18, 2003

"By popular demand, this is a short introduction to RSS, a tool for tracking headlines and new content on Web sites. This tutorial uses Bloglines, a free, Web-based RSS aggregator (reader).

RSS is a bit baffling at first. Once you step in, though, you'll have an immediate 'ah hah.' These directions were written to get you from baffled to 'ah hah' in less than fifteen minutes.

RSS Tutorial

In this brief tutorial, following a brief explanation of RSS, you'll get signed up to the feed (the headlines for new entries) for Resource Shelf, Gary Price's invaluable site for staying up to date on a wide variety of Internet resources. (You can always unsubscribe to it later, in seconds, if it's not your cup of tea.) Then learn about several related tools for using RSS, including several good finding aids for locating other feeds."

Using An "Aggregator" To Capture RSS Feeds: A Technology For Keeping Up-To-Date

By Steven Bell, Director of Gutman Library, Philadelphia University

"A number of LTAs (Low-Threshold Applications) deal with time on task issues - how to become more efficient while accomplishing more activities. "Keeping up" is an activity for which we never seem to have enough time. Yet, if we fail to keep up, especially with news technologies and ideas for improving our teaching and integration of technology into it, we ultimately weaken our ability as educators.

This LTA discusses two technologies that can go together, and when used appropriately they can make keeping up a far easier chore. These two technologies are:

(1) RSS Feeds and (2) News Aggregators.

What do they do, and why do you need to know about them? Imagine that there are several Web sites and Weblogs you want to follow. The traditional approach is to bookmark each site, and then visit them daily. They may or may not offer new items each day. Wouldn't it be much better to use just one technology that would visit all of these Web sites, collect any new information posted there each day, and then aggregate that information for you in one easy to read spot. That is the gist of what a news aggregator does. While the technology that makes this all work is on the complex side, like any good LTA the actual implementation and use of RSS and aggregators is actually very easy."