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Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
Director, User Services and Network Applications
joe@uoregon.edu
When you visit news sites or similar types of information sites these days, you may notice small "RSS" or "XML" links on those pages. Some examples of major online websites that have RSS or XML links on their web pages include:
There are many others, although you may sometimes need to dig around to find the RSS or XML link on the page. More often than not, however, RSS or XML links are included on major news sites.[1]
Unfortunately, if you try clicking on one of those links in many popular web browsers, you'll often see only an ugly page of text that looks like gibberish, containing lots of raw XML code. If this happens to you, the problem is that you're using the wrong tool. Most web browsers do not know how to properly interpret RSS feeds "out of the box." While you could get around that problem by using a specialized RSS news aggregator program or by adding an RSS plug-in to your current web browser, one solution that works really well for reading RSS feeds is to use the free web browser Opera, which does know how to handle RSS without any modification. If you don't currently have Opera on your system, you can download it for free from http://www.opera.com/
Once you have installed Opera, find a website that has an RSS feed. For example, the Seattle Times newspaper has an RSS feed link tucked away at the bottom of http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/
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If you click that link, you'll be taken to a page full of XML links representing various parts of the Seattle Times site:
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You could pick any of those sections, but for this example let's choose Business and Technology. When we click on that link, we see:
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When you click Yes to subscribe to that feed, you'll then see:
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Double-click on one of the listed articles to see it. For example:
If the brief synopsis of the article looks interesting, click on the link to retrieve the whole article:
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When you're ready to go back and check out your other RSS feeds, go to Opera's Feeds menu and pick another feed to visit:
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or just go to "Read Feeds" to check what's new from ALL your RSS feeds.
The real value in RSS feeds lies in RSS's ability to easily check and interleave multiple RSS feed sources on an automated basis.
Once you've subscribed to feeds of interest, you can quickly scan new items, selecting only the ones that look interesting and skipping the rest.
RSS represents pure content, with none of the encrusted blinking advertising and miscellaneous cruft that you'd otherwise have to wade through just to look for updated news items. Moreover, most RSS readers keep track of what you've already read, so you don't need to remember what you've seen and what you haven't--your RSS reader will do it for you. You can concentrate solely on the new content that's available.
Some sites, such as Yahoo News, will even let you create custom RSS feeds. For example, if you're attending the UO from Fiji and want an exclusive RSS feed of Yahoo News items about Fiji, Yahoo News will let you build a custom RSS feed to satisfy that specific desire.
RSS feeds actively pull content from RSS feed sites. Because of that, if some enthusiastic RSS users subscribe wantonly, setting their systems to frequently poll a large number of sites for new RSS items on a rapid basis, the load on those RSS feed sites can quickly become substantial. Please show restraint, and "only take what you can eat."
In particular, please try to live with the default three-hour polling interval that Opera uses when retrieving RSS subscription content if at all possible.
Also, if you're no longer interested in a particular RSS feed that you once subscribed to, please delete it from the feeds you routinely check--don't let it run forever.
UO faculty, UO students or UO staff with questions about reading RSS feeds with Opera are welcome to contact me at joe@uoregon.edu
[1] I've begun maintaining a list of major sites offering RSS feeds at http://www.uoregon.edu/~joe/rss.html If there are major sites I've missed, or sites of special relevance to Oregon, feel free to suggest them to me (all suggestions are subject to acceptance).