RSS: Beginning To See The Light
You know you’re old when you don’t understand technology without an instruction manual. Such has been my experience up to now of RSS - the technology that lets you collect the content of hundreds of blogs in one place and flick between them with impunity. RSS relies on a bit of software, called an RSS reader, which does the collecting and organising for you before said impunious flicking can take place.
The ones I’d tried in the past were ugly as sin and weren’t ready to go out of the box - there was a lot of fiddling about to be done before any blogs could be read. I gave up, reasoning that for all the hype and hoopla, it couldn’t be that important.
FeedDemon, which I downloaded a couple of days ago, has so impressed me I’ve been using it continuously ever since. It works straightaway and it has scores of blogs already installed. Installing more and deleting unwanted ones is a doddle and the format for reading them, with an Outlook-like postings display and a tabbed browser to move between postings and display web pages linked from them, is easy on the eye. I’ve finally brought all the blogs I like together in one place and can dip into them whenever I want. This on the one hand is no big deal, but on the other is means I will actually get to skim them on a regular basis rather than not bother at all. I’m pretty ruthless about what blogs I bother with, so I know the 20 or so I’ve selected will always come up with something interesting rather than drowning me in inane info overload.
For most of you reading this, broadband net access is probably something so commonplace that you don’t even think about it or the way that it’s changed your Net using habits. For the last year I’ve virtually had to stop reading blogs because net access in the coastal and island regions of Thailand is slow and expensive. It’s like 1996 all over again. FeedDemon is going to let me quickly grab the latest postings from my favourite blogs and read them offline. Me like.
So - not only do I finally get the importance of RSS, it’s made me start thinking about website design, specifically spike’s future format. After another thankless few days fooling around with HTML templates to produce the latest update to the site, it strikes me that everything on spike could be done much more easily through a blog. Now that Blogger has Post Pages, with each post having its own unique page, each article could simply be posted in the blog and the front page used as an index and way in to all that content. It would mean no farting around with templates et al after the initial setup. And that I could post from anywhere, rather than having to drag a laptop around and find a connection. Blogger would become a crude but effective content management system. All those articles are then simultaneously available through RSS as well as the Web - and if it’s in RSS, it means it’s portable to pretty much every other platform too. (Techheads can slay me for that blithe assertion if required).
More fundamentally, RSS signals a return of the Web to what it does best - words. In a sense, RSS puts the web back a decade, stripping away all the bells and whistles and letting the user concentrate on the information alone. At least, that’s my brief experience so far. With FeedDemon reducing everything to the same generic reader format, I don’t have to get distracted by flashing ads et al and simply think about the text itself.
So - there must be other people light years ahead of me with this. Who runs a site using blog software as a CMS? Inform me of the highs and lows. Because right now I feel like I’ve just rediscovered the Net. Which is nice.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Paid To Blog
- Writer’s Dues
- Blog on Been enjoying surfing round blogs recen…
- Big Smoke Blogs
- Good Moaning
