RSS Feeds?????

quidsinquentin

Can anyone tell me how to go about connecting to the RSS feeds or whatever it does/is? You know, the news gathering service.

I've tried once and completely cocked it up - as nothing happened with it.

I keep seeing the little orange signs (esp. on the BBC website) and I thought that would be nice to have that. But when I read what it does and how to do it, it might as well have been in Greek! (apologies to any Greek MSEr's).

Any help would be appreciated.

tomd84

Its a little feed, that will give you "RealTime" news updates to your desktop, for example sharpreader, it will bring a little popup everytime a news item is posted on your desktop a bit like msn alerts

Thanks tom :-)

quidsinquentin

Cheers - but how do I do it? Any sites that give non-tekkie info?

sra

Here's a little intro to RSS video -
http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/archives/2005/11/rb_05_nov_10.html

niceguyrichy

look at this:


you get that window pop up when you click on the rss button in the address bar (highlighted blue). Click yes, and the feed will be saved in the feeds menue at the top next to bookmarks.
as you get new feeds you'll get a little pop up in the bottom right corner telling you you got a new feed from wherever it is.

is that all you needed, or do you want to link feeds to Google as well?

sra

I've tried to explain it a hundred times and each time I come up with a different way of explaining it....

Wouldn't it be good if you could have a computer program that keeps track of all your favourite websites?
It would go to all your sites and check if there were any new stories and if there were any, it would grab a quick summary.

The problem is that websites come in all shapes and sizes and a program would never be able to tell what's what.

This is where RSS comes in.

The idea is that your favourite sites have two versions of their pages. One for you to read, and one for a computer to read. The computers version is in a format called RSS or ATOM (but there's not much difference between the two and "RSS" is often used for both)

You just have to pick a Newsreader (often called aggregator) and tell it where your favourite site's RSS/Atom page is.

For example, the BBC News homepage is here
Click the RSS icon on the left and you see the RSS page. Copy the Url for this RSS page and paste it into the appropriate place in your reader -

I like Google Reader, but Bloglines seems to be the most used online one.
For ofline, Greatnews is good


Here's MSEs RSS feeds
Here's a working example of what they look like in Google Reader

masonic

niceguyrichy wrote:

you get that window pop up when you click on the rss button in the address bar (highlighted blue). Click yes, and the feed will be saved in the feeds menue at the top next to bookmarks.

You're using Opera, I see. Is there any way to view feeds as webpages, i.e. outside of that awful mail client? Maybe I've been spoilt with the RSS support in Avant browser, but I can't go back to that 'usenet' environment.

Astaroth

The feeds arent webpages thought... RSS is simply an agreed structure for XML files... any layout that is applied to it is not defined in the RSS itself but by the website/ reader reading it.

masonic

Astaroth wrote:

The feeds arent webpages thought... RSS is simply an agreed structure for XML files... any layout that is applied to it is not defined in the RSS itself but by the website/ reader reading it.

Sure, but having each list item displayed as individual mail messages that you have to select to see the description in plain text is taking it a bit far, no?

niceguyrichy

personalise Google

lets you add / remove whatever rss feeds you like, and shows you the description so you only need to read the ones you want to.

heres mine atm:

masonic

niceguyrichy wrote:

personalise Google

lets you add / remove whatever rss feeds you like, and shows you the description so you only need to read the ones you want to.

Well, I guess it's that or stick to reading RSS in Avant :rolleyes: . I'm just a bit disappointed that they've gone to the trouble of integrating RSS support into Opera, but with such a user unfriendly interface. I'll see if I can get on with one of the web clients...