RSS: Really Simple

RSS offers an easy way to pull content updates at websites to your mail client or browser

Friday, October 01, 2004

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RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format for syndicating content from websites, akin to what print publishing has been doing for many years-publishing syndicated content, such as columns and horoscopes. RSS was initially designed as a format for building portals of headlines to mainstream news sites. But now, you can use the RSS-aware software, called RSS aggregators or readers, to fetch news and any additional content from websites. For example, you can aggregate content from BBC, Disney, Forbes and Wired all at one place. Websites, on the other hand, use an XML-based communication standard to distribute syndicated content to users. Any content distributed using RSS format is called RSS feed.

This article will show you how to get RSS content using RSS readers for Windows, Linux and Mac.

NewsGator
NewsGator is a news aggregator that works in MS Outlook. It lets you subscribe to various news feeds, and then delivers them to your Outlook folders. The program, after installation, creates a NewsGator toolbar in Outlook, from where it can be configured for use. To subscribe to RSS feeds, select the 'Subscriptions...' option after clicking the 'NewsGator' button on the toolbar. This will open up a new dialog box. Click on the Add button and select the 'Add Feed' option. Another dialog box opens up, which will ask you to enter the URL of the RSS feed you wish to subscribe. To know the RSS-feed URL of a website, offering RSS feeds, open up that website and look for the word RSS or the symbol. Click on that link or button. It will open up an XML page that, itself, will make no sense to you. Nevertheless, copy that URL and paste in the NewsGator window, and it will create a new folder for that URL and will fetch the latest news from that website to you. Add as many URLs as you want and NewsGator will create separate folders for all those URLs, where it will post the news items. You can even organize the different news folders into groups, say sports, world and technology. Now there is no need to subscribe to mailing lists or surf the different websites, just press the 'Get News' button on the NewsGator toolbar and the latest news will be available, right in your Outlook folders.

NewsGator posts RSS content to your Outlook folders Deepnet is a free RSS news aggregator and provides an Outlook-type interface for checking news

You can find a time-limited trial of NewsGator on our this month's DVD.

Deepnet Explorer
Deepnet Explorer is another RSS aggregator and unlike NewsGator it is available for free. However, it does not integrate with your Outlook. Instead, it has its own interface, complete with a Web browser, news reader and P2P file sharing. To subscribe, to news feeds, just click on the Subscribe button on the main Deepnet Explorer window and enter the RSS-feed URL. It will fetch all news items from that website, which you can read in Deepnet's Outlook- type interface. You can download the software from www.deepnetexplorer. com or get it from our this month's DVD.

RSS on Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird
RSS readers are also available for Mozilla Firefox Web browser and Thunderbird mail client, both of which are available for Windows, Linux and Mac. For Firefox, there is the Sage news reader extension. It integrates with Firefox as a side panel and works through the Firefox Bookmarks. To add RSS feeds to it, just add the URL of the RSS feed as a bookmark and Sage will then fetch and display all news items posted on that URL.

Forumzilla installs within Thunderbird and fetches RSS feeds to its local folders

Sage can be downloaded from http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=77&vid=630 or can be found on our this month's DVD.

Like NewsGator, which works with Outlook, Forumzilla is an RSS extension for Mozilla Thunderbird. It creates a separate folder in Thunderbird and fetches all news items to that folder. It can be downloaded from http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=133&vid=484 or can be found on our this month's DVD.

Anoop Mangla

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