“The greatest compliment you can pay to any news feed or blogger is to put them on your home page…”

RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) is a way to “subscribe” to a web site (like subscribing to a magazine). You’re notified when something is published that you want to read (both words are important) instead of your having to go and look for it.

RSS offers advantages to both the publisher and the reader.

• About a third of the emails that people want to read never arrive because they’re caught up in their spam filters.

• You can't be spammed with RSS, but you can be sure that the stuff you want to read gets through.

My home page, my window on the world

The screen shot below shows my “news" feed. Click on it and you'll find:

• Headlines from the front page of today’s New York Times, Google News and my local newspaper, The NZ Herald. (Sorry guys, I cancelled my print subscription!)

• Links to all my current news feeds, lower right.

The way you receive RSS feeds may be quite different to mine (your content certainly will be) but I’ll explain later why I think mine’s a good example.

I used to have my news feeds on the same page as the blogs I’ve subscribed to, but the blogs got swamped by the news. I now display them separately, as in the top screen shot. Click on that graphic and you’ll see links to IT and marketing blogs etc, as well as the Photojunction and Queensberry blogs. Some are “feeds of feeds” – like Arts and Letters Daily, which points out interesting stuff in everything from The New Yorker to The London Review of Books.

RSS feeds are outstanding for everything from news and sport to stock watching… and Joke Of The Day.
You may wonder why I bother with some of this stuff, but they’re just my personal choices. With RSS I get to opt in, and I can opt out any time I like. I don’t read everything of course, but I do scan the headlines. And as soon as something stops being interesting, I unsubscribe.

The greatest compliment you can pay to any news feed or blogger is to put them on your home page, which is I’ve done.

In a nutshell, subscribe to our blog and our posts will be delivered to your desktop along with The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator and whatever else you fancy. And you can read them or ignore them as you wish.

Click here for more about how RSS works. 

By Ian Baugh