MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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Can someone explain it for me. I did 'wikipedia' it but it was too difficult.
[url= http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm ]The BBC explain it very clearly...[/url]
Well, for actual real world usage not a technical explanation, on this page for instance you can see a little icon saying RSS feed for this topic. If you click on that then you'll see this page of posts without all the surrounding gubbins right?
Well, that page is just a webpage and you can take that URL and drop it into any 'reader'.
So, readers, it might be an RSS reader on a mobile phone, it might be in a customisable home page offered by a lot of search engines or it might be a little appplication you might use. I for example have Vista and in the sidebar I've added a gadget called hermes. This can now go off and update itself as often as I set it too and show me whats new on that RSS feed.
I'll post this now, add this as an RSS feed and come back with a screenshot....
...so, here's a shot of this thread, and you can click on any of them for more.
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...you can see better how its used with this one, the main BBC news feed...
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...so this is just one example of a reader, the main thing is that when you see pages available as RSS feeds you can get a different version of the page you see which is marked up to be read by any kind of reader. This way they keep it away from slow to download graphics and code.
So, many people will 'add to their reader' lots of feeds they are interested in to save them kepping visiting different places. Plus readers can often have options to filter and show you items you want.
Hope that's been of some help, you'll either think 'that's useless' or 'oh, thats actually handy' ...it can be good on mobile phones.
Thanks sweep I get it now.
I use [url= http://www.google.co.uk/reader/ ]Google Reader[/url] and I subscribe to around 40 odd different website feeds.
So I'm never really short of something of interest to read, but I don't waste my time trawling around the same old sites looking for new stuff.
Google Reader has the advantage that I can use it on different PCs and my iPhone and it will stay in sync.
No problem, its not one of those principals that explains its real world usage very easily is it. It can be dead useful though ...I thought that explanation might be easier than talking about XML !!
Does anyone know of an OS X RSS reader that syncs online so you see the same feeds in both?
Netnewswire I use which sync with a web client and also an iPhone client.
http://www.newsgator.com/INDIVIDUALS/NETNEWSWIRE/
Do I need to start a What's XML thread now then?
I've done it on my phone now, even more ways to waste time while I wait for innocent tourists/terrorists to harass.
Does anyone know of an OS X RSS reader that syncs online so you see the same feeds in both?
Again, just use Google Reader. It's a web app so it works on any OS.
@theginganinja : Perfect, just waht I was looking for; not quite as nice as newsfire, but way more useful
@GrahamS - newsgator is the webapp and has a desktop client too all accessing the desktop feeds. Not all of us like to feed off the big G for everything. 🙂
Fair enough. The trouble is that Big G does everything really quite well. 😀