2010 Guide to Technology: Basic RSS

Dec 28th, 2009 | By Yana Siganur | Category: 2010 Tech Guide, Featured, Lead Article

Welcome to Social Media Law Student’s 2010 Guide to Technology. These posts will shine some light on various tips and tricks that you can use to become more efficient in your everyday life. The complete guide can be found here.

How much time do you spend visiting the same set of websites every day? Does it get frustrating always fitting these 15-30 websites into your busy routine? Doesn’t it frustrate you when you miss something important or when a group of them have not even been updated in a while?

This, my friends, is where RSS fits in. It’s a one-stop shop for all things net-related. Instead of going out and getting every single news story, case holding, sports score, daily comic, etc., have them all come to you in a neat and organized package. Stop wasting your time tracking bookmarked websites.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: RSS, Really Simple Syndication.

What is it?

RSS is a means of aggregating posts from nearly every website that exists on the internet. Instead of visiting sites separately and navigating to fresh content in the sections you are interested in, have it all come to you.

“RSS feeds” are either full posts or excerpts from websites of any topic. Every time a new story is posted on the site, it will automatically get “pushed” (forwarded) to your “reader,” which is the software that collects the feeds.

Whenever you see the RSS symbol–an orange square with rounded edges, a white dot in the lower left hand corner, and two white lines curved on top of the dot¬–on the far right side of your URL bar (Firefox, Safari, Chrome) or between the Home and Print icons (Internet Explorer), just click on it and you’re done. That website’s updates will now be automatically forwarded to your reader.

Why should I care?

For starters, apart from reading case law and remembering to eat once in a while, law students barely have time to do much of anything. And attorneys are always on the lookout for important case law, legislative innovations, expert viewpoints, etc. Readers collect and organize feeds for you when you don’t have time. In addition, software like Google Reader even recommends new feeds for you based on what you are already following.

Under the organizational aspect, posts are ordered chronologically (oldest or newest) and, to better keep track of what you’ve already seen, read posts can be removed from your view. Reader software counts how much new and unread material is waiting for you. Users can also save posts to read later, to keep around for future reference, or even as part of research.

Under the social media aspect, readers are constantly being enhanced to allow users to share posts that they find interesting or pertinent with others, as well as let them follow other noteworthy users. For example, to get more background information, a student might want to check out what his professors are reading/sharing; or an attorney could take a look at what experts as well as his peers are reading. Using the reader’s comment feature, users then can discuss the articles they share.

How do I set it up?

The most straightforward site to use is Google. Assuming you have (or will now have) a Google account, go to google.com/reader. From here, you really are good to go. Add websites by:

Using the Reader’s search engine to find a term or type in the URL of a website (click on “Add a subscription” in the top left corner).
Visiting a website and click on the RSS icon in the top right corner.

Now you’re free to organize feeds using folders or tags, sort by date or relevance, add stars to your favorite posts, share interesting posts with others, search through all your subscriptions, etc. As you browse each new post, items will be automatically marked as read. You can browse on laptop, smartphone, or iPhone and, with some extra tweaking, you can even access posts offline (see site for details).

To get you started, I recommend you try out some of these: the Dilbert comic strip, Real Simple, Social Media Law Student (of course!), Lifehacker, Wired, CNN, and MSNBC. And for some fun for those of you who use Google Reader, hit the following keys: up up down down left right left right b a (enter the code again to return to normal).