The Family

I’ve seen comments around here about not seeing updates on a website, waiting a while, coming back and seeing so many new posts it’s almost embarrassing. Well, I’m going to help you out by giving you a little bit of online education. MMmmmm…. edumication…Before we begin, I’m going to make a few assumptions. First, you use firefox. Internet Explorer 6 need not apply. (and, unless they make some changes, Internet Explorer 7 can go away too). Mozilla/Opera/Safari have things similiar to what I’m going to talk about, but I don’t use those browsers. Second, you know how to use bookmarks. If you don’t… wow. You must have a great memory. Third, you are ready to learn about the wonders of RSS Feeds.

Ready? Let’s go get some learnin on!

First, let’s define what RSS means.

RDF Site Summary, or Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication – A lightweight XML format for distributing news headlines and other content on the Web

Don’t worry if that doesn’t really mean much to you. I’ll just tell you to focus on the ‘distributing news headlines’ part. That’s what you’re going to be excited about.

Now let’s talk about firefox and bookmarks. Firefox has a feature they call ‘Live Bookmarks’. Here’s the idea: When you visit a site that has an RSS Feed, you can create a Live Bookmark.

I’ll bet ya’ll are getting an idea of where this is going.

Instead of talking a lot, I’m going to jump to doing something with this.

In the address bar, on the far right of the address that starts with family.4101.org, you’ll see an orange icon. Here it is:

Looks like something doing a signal broadcast. Sorta.

When you click on it, you’ll get a menu asking where you want to create the Live Bookmark. Select ‘Bookmarks’ as your destination and click ‘ok’. Now open your bookmarks and you’ll see something like this:

Now that is the sign of a Live Bookmark. The orange RSS symbol is the dead giveaway and the arrow to the right is your best friend. When you click on this bookmark it will act just like a regular folder…except the contents aren’t known until you click it. The contents of this bookmark update with the live data. (hey, Live Bookmarks!)

Here’s what it looks like when you click on it:

Hey, look at that! A listing of the current, up-to-the-minute posts! Each one will take you strait to the post that you want to read about. Now, I’ll admit, it doesn’t list anything more than the title of a post and you have to remember what posts you have seen and which ones you haven’t. But isn’t it faster to look at a bookmark than it is to open up a website and go looking?

The really cool thing? This works for any website that has an RSS Feed. Most blogging systems produce RSS Feeds, WordPress being no exception. It isn’t anything you need to setup; it is just done by default.

As a last subject, there is software out there that is specifically built to help you manage multiple RSS Feeds. If you find them useful, it might be useful to look into an RSS Feed Aggregator. For me, I don’t have so many sites that I check that I use RSS Feeds all the time, but it is a useful feature that everyone can use.