Thursday, March 08, 2007

So what is this RSS Subscription thing anyway?

So you may have been asking yourself, over the last few weeks-- "What is this orange thingey they put up here with the 'Subscribe to Aidan's Daily Note'?

It's a link to our RSS feed.

Hoping not to bore you with too much jargon, let me just tell you RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and what it allows you to do is-- with an RSS reader (browsers like Safari and Firefox have RSS readers built into them now), also known as a 'news aggregator'-- you can receive a little feed that shows you whenever new things have been added to the page.

So instead of having to come to this page everytime you want to see if I've added something new, you can just check the feed.

I know, I know.. that doesn't sound so cool.. unless you consider all the websites you visit in a day-- many of which now publish RSS feeds along with them. So now.. instead of having to view each of those sites individually, you can see the headlines for ALL fo them simultaneously on a single screen.

Google for instance, has incorporated this into both their "Personalized Home Page" and their newer "Google Reader". "My Yahoo" does the same thing.
Here's a screenshot of the personalized Google page I use to keep up with all the Notre Dame football news.

Okay.. so that's that.. just in case you were wondering..

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