by Kevin G. Summers “RSS. programs can scan for new items without hampering your work. They even work well over slower dial-up connections.”
-John R. Quain, Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information, New York Times
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As you may be aware, SubTel Forum has been broadcasting an RSS feed since June 2008. The purpose of our feed is to save you time and keep you on top of what’s happening in the industry. Sure, you can subscribe to a dozen feeds to learn the latest info from Alcatel-Lucent, Tyco and other industry leaders, or you can subscribe to one feed and get all of the same information delivered to your desktop every day. I want to take a minute to examine this technology and what it means to the SubTel community. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a means of syndicating content directly to anyone who subscribes to our feed. To put it simply, instead of visiting our website multiple times to check for news updates, never knowing when you’ll find a story that piques your interest, you can have the updates come directly to you through an RSS reader. The articles appear in your reader as a list of headlines
that you can scan through and easily pick the stories you want to read more about. RSS is a great way to keep on top of industry news without spending countless hours reading every article on SubTel Forum. Subscribing is simple. All it takes to get connected to our feed is to click on the RSS button on our webpage or in the magazine. There’s an RSS button on this page...go ahead, try it. Did you see something that looked like a website address? That’s our feed. Add that address to your RSS reader, and you’ll be connected in minutes. This all sounds great, right, but what about the RSS reader? Is this going to cost a lot of money or be overly difficult to setup? Not at all. There’s a good chance that your computer already has a reader installed, and if not, you can download and install one for free or for a very small cost. The Firefox brower, for example, has a built-in reader called “Live Bookmarks,” and many e-
mail applications are also able to serve as an RSS reader. I subscribe to several feeds, and they all display as new messages in my inbox. Here are just a few of RSS readers that you might want to consider: Google Reader Bloglines NetNewsWire SharpReader AmphetaDesk NewsGator News Is Free Radio UserLand I certainly hope you will join the thousands of SubTel readers who have already subscribed to our RSS Feed. It’s one of the fastest and easiest ways to keep on top of the industry and get your News Now.
What do you think? Click on the Letter To The Editor icon and drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you.