OK, I admit it. I'm a techno-geek. I own one of the original PalmPilot PDAs.
I still have it in a drawer somewhere…cracked screen and all.
Technology is all over my life. Every now and then, however, I'm
uncharacteristically slow in adopting a new technology. I've been
hearing the term RSS
for years, but never really took the time to understand the technology.
Now that I do, I wonder why it took me so long. RSS (and ATOM) feeds
are great time-management tools if you know how to use them.
I'm
a voracious reader, particularly when it comes to news items and
magazine articles on topics that interest me. Long ago, I learned about
the benefits of pre-reading and skimming. Pre-reading
is a technique for quickly determining the topic and general content of
an article to determine if it is worth spending time reading it in
depth. Some people call this skimming but in my opinion skimming is a
different skill, somewhere between pre-reading and normal reading. Both
pre-reading and skimming are important time-management techniques. If
you read as much as I do, you need learn them.
With the advent
of the Internet, we have access (and most of it free) to more
information sources than anyone could have imagined just a couple
decades ago. For someone like me, this can create a time-management
nightmare. There are easily 50+ web sites that I visit on a regular
basis, from The Detroit News to Christianity Today to Rotten Tomatoes,
not to mention all the other bloggers I read. That’s where RSS comes
in. Most online publications (including bloggers like me) now offer an
RSS feed, which provides the title and the first few paragraphs of the
content. With a good RSS reader/aggregator, you can be notified when a
new article is posted and quickly determine if it’s worth reading or
not. This can save you lots of surfing time.
So I’m a little
embarrassed to admit that I’m just now getting up to speed on this
technology, but better late than never, right? If you’re an
information-aholic like me, you need to check out this technology. I
haven’t actually calculated how much time I’m saving, but I’m confident
it’s significant. Here are a few of the RSS aggregators I’ve tried,
with some comments. Since I’m a cheapskate, these are all free.
-
My Yahoo lets you add RSS feeds to your home page but you only get article titles, so I didn’t find it all that helpful.
- The Firefox browser has some RSS support (called Live Bookmarks) built-in, but it’s not very feature-rich. Habari Xenu is a plug-in for Firefox that is much superior to the built-in support.
-
There are stand-alone Windows applications like Feed Explorer and Sharp Reader. They’re nice, but I prefer something that’s integrated into software I already use regularly.
- Right now, I’m using intraVnews
(thanks for the tip, Bob), which is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook.
Since Outlook is always running on my PC, this has been the most
convenient aggregator I’ve tried. Until I find something better, I
think I’m sticking with this one.
If you’re a patient
soul, Internet Explorer 7 and Outlook 12 are supposed to have built-in
RSS support, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Besides, why wait? You
could be saving valuable time right now.
P.S. In case you haven’t noticed, the link for my RSS feed is on the right, below the calendar.