Tip: open all links from this page in new windows or new tabs so that you don't lose track of the instructions. To get a menu which allows you to do this, right-click on the links (Windows) or hold down the Control key while clicking (Mac).
Objectives
In this workshop, you will:
- Learn what an RSS feed is and how it allows you to receive news or keep track of when a website is updated
- Learn to recognize when a website offers an RSS feed
- Subscribe to some feeds with Google Reader
- Learn how to move around in Google Reader and use its features to control and organize your feed subscriptions
- Subscribe to some feeds with Microsoft Outlook
- Be exposed to iGoogle: the Google Homepage
- Find feeds on some sample web pages
- Make a post to your blog documenting your thoughts and experiences
What are RSS feeds?
How do you keep track of all the sites you want to read regularly, and put it together in one place? How do you, professionally or personally, make sure that you are not missing a crucial piece of information that's been posted to a website or blog? The answer is ... RSS!
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but IMHO that definition isn't really that important to understand about RSS. RSS is important for what it does not for what it is. Most blogs, and many other websites, put out an "RSS feed". You can think of an RSS feed like a stock or news ticker. When new events occur, they are broadcast ("syndicated") over the feed to be picked up by whoever cares to watch for them or whoever has subscribed to the feed. Feed, in this setting, is shorthand for "data feed." From good old Wikipedia, "Data feed is a mechanism for users to receive updated data from data sources." (Data feed) In this case, the data is information that I want to know about on blogs or websites. I subscribe to RSS feeds of all different types: library-related news publications, tech publications, our databases' blogs, buoy reports, local news, weather. Both professional stuff and personal stuff is delivered to me when updates happen and I don't have to remember to search through my bookmarks to discover if some bit of information has happened that I don't want to miss. RSS helps me keep up-to-date on the information that I care about without being overwhelmed (i.e. suffering from information overload) and without worrying that I might have missed something I need to know. RSS is one tool, IMHO, a good tool, for helping to alleviate the feeling of information overload.
How does RSS work? A person subscribes to a feed from an information source they might care about (Artstor, BBC News, librarian.net, etc) When you subscribe to a feed, you will be notified of new items on the blog or website as they are posted, without having to repeatedly visit it yourself, not knowing whether you will find anything new. Software or a web service which keeps track of all your feeds for you is known as a "feed aggregator" or an "RSS reader". In this class, we will be using Google Reader and/or your work email program, Microsoft Outlook.
Commoncraft has a great video (about 3 minutes; sound required) titled "RSS in Plain English" which will also help you understand what RSS is about:
How to recognize the presence of an RSS feed
Go to http://reader.google.com. Open a new window in your web browser and sign in to Google if you are not already logged in.
Look up at your address bar (Firefox) or toolbar (Internet Explorer). See the small orange icon at/near the end of it? Here's what you're looking for, near the top right-hand corner:
Windows/Firefox
Windows/Internet Explorer
The orange square with the white dot and two arcs is the standard symbol for an RSS feed. In Firefox this area is blank if a page does not offer a feed, and the icon appears when the browser detects one. In Internet Explorer, the symbol is present on the toolbar but greyed out when no feed is available, and turns orange when there is one.
Within a webpage itself, you might see a button of that symbol, or you might also see an orange rectangle with the letters "RSS", "XML", or "ATOM" in white. (Atom is another format for an RSS feed.) Here are some examples:
Some web pages do offer a feed and have such a button somewhere on the page, but fail to trigger the browser notification up at the top. We'll look at one example of such a site in a moment.
Now let's look at some examples and start subscribing. Did you log into Google Reader earlier (http://reader.google.com) in your other browser window? Go there now if you haven't.
Google Reader's directory
On the left of the screen you will see a green box inviting you to "Discover >>" and "Add subscription". Click "Discover".
If you have a fresh Google account with no usage history, you will be in the "Browse" area, where Google will offer you some "feed bundles" for News, Sports, and Fun.
If you have been logged in to Google while searching, or using your account in other ways, you may get "Recommendations". Click the green "Browse" tab if so.
On this page, there are easy "Subscribe" buttons (white pluses on blue) for each bundle, which will add them to Google Reader. Select one of the three on this page and click its "Subscribe" link. After a moment, the bundle will appear as a folder in the blue box at the bottom left, with the individual feed subscriptions listed below it. The number at the end of each feed is the number of unread items that exist in that feed.
Navigating Google Reader
Click on one of the feed titles that you added to your subscriptions. Its available items will appear in the right-hand panel. Click once on the text or in the white space of the first item, and a blue outline will appear around its box. This blue outline highlights the current item, and marks it as read.
At the bottom of each item's box, there are a number of links: "Add star", "Share", "Email", "Mark as read", and "Edit tags". As you scroll down through the items, the blue box will jump from one item to the next, a checkmark will appear in the box next to "Mark as read", and the number at the end of the feed title (the remaining unread items) will decrease.
You don't need to click the link to mark the item as read; that happens automatically. The checkmark is an on-off switch, and you would only click it if you wanted to change the status back to unread.
In the blue bar at the top of the right-hand panel, you will see "Show:" followed by two links, "[#] new items" and "all items".
The first will show only the items in the feed that you have not yet marked read, whereas the second will show you all current items in the feed, even if you have already read them.
You don't delete items from an RSS feed the way you do with email; they are stored for a period of time and eventually expire when they have aged past a certain date (set by the feed administrator).
If you'd like to come back to an item later, click "Add star" at the bottom of its box to mark it. It will appear when you click the "Starred items" link in the top left blue panel, and you don't have to go digging back through old feed items to locate it. (This functions like bookmarking a website, although it does not add the item to your browser bookmarks.)
Unsubscribing from RSS feeds
Be careful when unsubscribing from feeds. Reader pops up a confirmation box, but once you have clicked "OK" in that box, there is no "undo". If you made a mistake and want the feed back again, you have to re-find it wherever you did originally and re-subscribe to it.
There are two ways to unsubscribe from feeds. One is simpler (fewer mouse clicks) if you just want to remove one feed, and the other is better if you want to remove several feeds at the same time.
If you just want to remove one feed, first view it by clicking on its title in the bottom-left blue panel. Now look back up at that blue bar on top of the right panel, and click the white "Feed settings" button right above that.
This opens a drop-down menu from which you can select "Unsubscribe".
If you want to remove several feeds, click the "Manage subcriptions >>" link at the bottom of the left panel (you do not need to scroll down; it's always visible).
Place a checkmark in the box next to the feeds you want to unsubscribe from and click the grey "Unsubscribe" button under the light orange bar at the top.
You can also click the trash can icon that appears after the "Rename" link for each feed.
RSS with Outlook
You may find it more comfortable to subscribe to RSS feeds with Microsoft Outlook. In this way, blog and website updates are delivered as emails to your normal email program. IMHO, neither Google Reader nor Outlook do this better than the other. They work a little differently so it's a matter of personal preference. For example, recently I've preferred to embed Google Reader into my iGoogle page, which I then set as my browser homepage. (I'll explain this a little later in this lesson.) Every time I open my browser, I see the recently updated items from the places that I've subscribed to. In the last month or so, I've subscribed to many of my RSS feeds with Outlook. It's also nice to have blog and website updates delivered as emails.
Setting up Outlook to collect your feeds is very easy. The instructions from the Outlook help screen are below.
Note: At times, I've found that Outlook won't subscribe to a feed on the first try. If this happens, try a 2nd time and it should work fine.
Also, here's a video that explains how to subscribe to a website or blog using Outlook. For some reason, the narrator uses the strange word "provision" instead of subscribe. (Shrug) It's a very straightforward video except for that one word "provision" ... don't let it throw you off. :)
Subscribe to some (or all) of your colleagues blogs. This is a collaborative learning environment so you can read and comment on your colleagues' blogs. You can find a list of the blogs on the right hand side of this page. To subscribe, scroll down to the bottom of their blog and look for this text:
Right click on the link 'Posts (Atom)' and choose 'Copy Shortcut'. This is the URL you'll need in the instructions above.
Also, dont' forget to subscribe to our library blog (http://pclwhatsnew.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default) and the public services blog, too (http://pclpublicservices.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default). Copy and paste these addresses into your Outlook after following the instructions above.
iGoogle: the Google Homepage
Now for my personal favorite tool for RSS and making sure that the information that I want comes to me. Google provides a way for you to include Google Reader and many other "Google Gadgets" into your Google homepage called iGoogle. Google Gadgets are little information gathering tools that you can place on your own personalized iGoogle page. In the image below, you can see some of the things that are possible. I have a gadget for Google Reader that collects all my RSS feeds (including Twitter, but we'll cover that in a future lesson), a gadget for BBC News, a gadget for the weather, and a gadget for a custom Google News search for e-textbooks. A lot is possible with iGoogle reader but I'll let you explore that on your own. The first image is my iGoogle page. The second image is my iGoogle page with one of the blogs I'm following expanded so I can read the post.
#1
#2
Other websites with feeds
Are you getting the hang of it? Just keep an eye out for that little orange and white symbol. When you see it, that means you can subscribe to content updates of some type from that website.
The first place to look is in your address bar or toolbar. If you don't find it there, it might be somewhere on the page. Some feeds do not use one of the standard symbols, and only link with words. And, of course, many web pages don't offer a feed at all (although more and more of them are doing so).
Take a look at each of the following links. You don't have to subscribe to all the feeds, but see if you can find the link, button, or icon that indicates the presence of the feed. (None of these are "tricks" in that they don't have a feed at all, but it's not always in the same place, and some do not trigger the address bar or toolbar icon.)
BBC News Front Page World Edition
Google News - Health Section
The Weather Channel
Discovery Channel News
Interesting Thing of the Day
Credit points for this workshop
Make a post in your blog addressing the following things, and send a link to the post to jbaker4@palomar.edu.
- What is RSS is and what it is for?
- Describe how to locate an RSS feed.
- Talk about a feature you liked or disliked on Google Reader and/or your thoughts on the user interface in general.
- Did you try out iGoogle? If so, what did you like or dislike about it?
- Talk about your experiences locating the feeds on the other sites mentioned and whether you have subscribed to any. Were you able to locate them all? Which ones did you have trouble with, if any?
Note: Some of this text was taken, with permission, from the 2008 Learning Web 2.0 project at DeAnza College in Cupertino, California and was written by my colleague Lisa Hatt.
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