Perhaps you’ve seen this icon on some of your favorite websites (even on the TQ NYC website) or in the toolbar of your browser and wondered about it. If so… read on!

This icon signifies an RSS (or similar) feed is available. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as well as Atoms and other XML formats allow content publishers (e.g. websites) to tag content with various types of information such as giving it a category, author info and more. For this discussion - probably the most important piece of information that is tagged is the DATE/TIME that the article was published. Although a very simple notion, this is extremely powerful as we will see shortly.

Using a Feed Reader (also called an aggregator) a visitor can “subscribe” to sites, specific parts of sites, podcasts and more.

Ready for the power of this?

Instead of going to all of your favorite websites to see if they have new articles up, news, etc. the content comes to YOU. Your RSS Feed Reader will go to each of the sites that you subscribe to and check the DATE/TIME of the content and let you know which ones have new content. This is all done quickly and gives you an overview so that in a few minutes you can get content from hundreds of sites (or less - or more - that’s up to you!) without leaving your RSS reader! It is a huge time saver and has become a major way that content is now distributed on the web. The use of smart phones has played a big part in this, as people using mobile devices would rather go to one page and get everything that they are looking for rather than 100 websites. In fact… there many sites where the main distribution of content is via it’s feeds - i.e. people no longer go to the site itself!

As mentioned previously the TQ NYC website has an RSS Feed - and we encourage you to subscribe to it so that you will always know about important news, program deadlines, etc.

Below we will give examples of using two popular methods for reading RSS feeds. For a list of many other RSS feed readers, see this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_feed_aggregators

And while this article focuses on the end user, you may be interested in more information about RSS, technical data, and implementation which you can find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

RSS Feeds in Firefox

One easy way to subscribe to RSS Feeds is to use “Live Bookmarks” in Firefox. “Live Bookmarks” are just a special name that Firefox uses for Feeds. Personally, I prefer the next method using Google Reader but you may like this more - plus it’s very simple and quick.

Let’s say we go to a website such as the BBC news site. Notice the URL window:

at the right, you will see the RSS Icon. Clicking on it brings up something like the following (your browser choices may differ):

We will use the default selection of “Live Bookmarks” but note that other options appear as well (we will use Google in the next example).

Next you will be prompted with a choices on where to save the feed:

The default choice “Bookmarks Menu” adds the feed to your regular bookmarks - but - notice that it has the RSS icon and mousing over it will show you all of the new articles.

Adding the feed to your toolbar gives you something like this:

While this is quick to get to, the downside is that if you have several Live Bookmarks (feeds), your tool bar will be cluttered quickly. So while saving feeds in Firefox is quick and simple, it is not necessarily the best for solution if you subscribe to many feeds - and after all, why not subscribe to many since it saves you time in browsing?

RSS Feeds with Google Reader

If you have an account with Google (i.e. you are using Gmail, Blogger, etc), then you are ready to go. If not, you will first need to create a Google account. You can do this from the sign up of page of any Google service, including Google Reader. The Google Reader page is here: www.google.com/reader

Google Reader is a browser-based application, so you will not have to install anything to get it to work. Once you have an account and login you’ll be at your home page. This is what mine looks like - which will be different since I’m already subscribed to many feeds:

A super brief overview… the main content of this page shows me new content, the left side shows me that I have 575 new items (bold), and shows me my subscriptions which I have organized into folders. Clicking on the design folder for example, expands it showing all of the subscriptions that I’ve put into this folder:

So for example, I can see the COLOURlovers has 1 new article, CSS-Tricks has 4 new articles and so on. Clicking on any of these will display the content in the main part of the browser window. From there I can scroll through all of the articles from a particular site and read the ones that I want - without really having to visit the site. As I read articles the side bar will update and the bold items (indicating unread) will decrease. There several other cool features, but one of my favorites is the link “Browse for stuff” as you read various feeds, Google Reader is learning the type of sites that you get content from. Eventually as you click on “Browse for stuff”, Google Reader will recommend other sites to you that may be of interest. Of course you can also just browse using categories, etc.

Adding a feed to Google Reader is easy. You can either use the “Add a subscription” button and paste in the URL:

Or… while you are browsing, you can use the same method described above for Firefox.

Click on the RSS icon, choose any of the subscription formats offered (RSS 2.0, or another) and you will be presented with this:

and choose “Google” instead of “Live Bookmarks.” This will open the Google Reader page for you and add the site to your subscriptions.

That’s it! Well.. you can do more but that’s a good start. Once you get used to it, I think you will find that this is a great way of keeping track of content, finding more content and saving time.