RSS
07/06/07 09:03 | Software
The second tip in our series of Apple Mac related tips is about Subscribing and more specifically, RSS.

RSS is still relatively unknown and yet has the power and functionality to be as ubiquitous as HTML is now.

We’ll start by explaining what RSS can do for you, say you’re a devout reader of the New York Times, you visit once a day and usually catch all the stories that you need to read, there’s probably a second or third newspaper that you do the same to. Well, the bloggers and newspapers came up with a way for their latest headlines as well as summaries of those stories to be sent straight to you so that you can keep up to date with EVERY story as its published.

If this sounds interesting to you, open a new Safari window and navigate to http://nytimes.com (or click our link), you’ll see the standard front page layout of the Times with Pictures and Formatting etc., well look at your address bar, look to the right and you’ll see a blue icon with RSS written inside in white something like this:

or this:

Click on this RSS symbol just once with your primary mouse button and you’ll see the NY Times front page go through a dramatic transition. Do you see this switch? Go ahead and try it, make sure you’re comfortable with this, because this is the first step to the wonderful world of RSS.

Your view of the NY Times front page has transformed to a simpler, graphic free, list of the latest 10 to 30 New
York Times articles, this view may not seem amazing to you yet, but take not of the extra tools you now have for reading articles, there’s now a live search box in the upper right section of the window pane, this search box provides dynamic filtering of articles, try it out by typing “Mayor” or “Police” into the dynamic search box, you’ll notice that with each letter you type the list of articles shortens as the dynamic filtering takes effect, there has NEVER been a function as powerful as this for the New York Times Frontpage or any other Newspaper or Blog, this is dynamic sorting implemented by Safari, and it’s rich client functions.

The combination of your local rich client and the simple RSS feeds from News sites and Blogs are what make RSS utterly outstanding.

So today, you’ve learnt about RSS, we made this lesson especially because we’re publishing an RSS feed from this AuburnCom Tips page, and we’d be delighted if this page is one of the first RSS feeds that you subscribe to.

If you find this tip helpful, please let me know by emailing Brendan@auburncom.com, of course if there’s more you’d like to know you should also send an email to us.

Remember that AuburnCom provides certified Apple Consulting services to the San Francisco Bay Area, we also supply and ship Hardware and Software upgrades including Hard Drives, SuperDrives, Memory and OS X, iLife, iWork, Aperture.

Thanks for reading!