Back in ancient times, before the World Wide Web, there were Newsgroups — places where announcements could be made and commented upon and questions asked and answered, but sadly because they were open to all, eventually they were overrun by spam.

In their time Newsgroups carried all the major news of the Internet, as now archived by Google at  http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html and were the method by which many people kept in touch, not only with what was happening to the Internet, but what was happening around the world. This method of transferring news told of the start of Microsoft, of the first cell phones, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first spam (in 1994) and much more.

Then came e-mail discussion groups and while these can be restricted to folk with a genuine interest, they have been falsely accused of being spam by many anti-spam programs and filters, and so are showing early signs of also being in their death-throws.

The Web itself is healthy, though increasingly of a stridently commercial voice which hides much of the genuine news and comment beneath the levels easily found via the search engines.

Blogs are the new newsgroups, but how do you find them and how do you keep track of those you find, especially those that may have interesting postings, but not at regular intervals?

The answer lies in those little block graphics on many Web pages with strange TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) like XML and RSS.
They meant nothing to me until I saw an article in May 2005 — it had the innocuous heading "RSS Feeds", meaningless to me at the time. After reading that article by Greg Lenihan of the Pikes Peak Computer Applications Society in Colorado, I discovered that RSS Feeds were something for which I was hungry.

Trying to find out more proved somewhat difficult. There is a lot more information around now.

The programs that check for and display multiple RSS feeds are called Aggregators and they come in two styles, 'web page style' and 'e-mail
style'. The latter are sometimes called 'three-pane aggregators' as they show the feed names, the list of items for the selected feed and the currently selected item in three separate panes.

"Web page style" aggregators show newly received entries as a Web page, in reverse chronological order (and so the end result looks very much like a blog, but with the items put together dynamically by the software).

I prefer the three-pane aggregators, of which two are shown here: SharpReader (Figure 1) and RSSOwI (Figure 2 and 2a). I'd be happy using either of them. Of the Web page style aggregators, I mention the new one from Guardian Unlimited by Newspoint. All of these are free, though the latter does have some somewhat intrusive advertising.

The idea is that you subscribe to feeds by finding the feed icons on Web sites and telling your news reader or aggregator program to check back at regular intervals. That program will then tell you when a new item is available, and show you the title and, usually, just a few lines of the item. You can then view more either in the reader or by opening the original Web page in your browser, usually achieved by double-clicking the item or the heading.

All these programs come preloaded with suggested feeds. For example, the Guardian's program (Figure 3.) comes with a wide choice of feeds from the Guardian Unlimited services plus news feeds from the BBC and Christian Science Monitor. You can also click to open a Web page in your browser from which you can add many other recommended and suggested sources.

Other feeds you are likely to find in aggregators such as RSSOwI include Slashdot, Wired magazine online, Quotes of the Day, New York Times book review, Variety, Dilbert, Rolling Stone and many, many more. There will also be links to pages that are guides to many more sources.

Your first step will probably be to delete the feeds for items which will be of no interest.

And be warned: RSS is addictive. By the time you add a scan of headlines from the Guardian, CNN, The Age, ABC and BBC to the time you already take to scan through your e-mail, you may never actually get anything done.

Create Your Own Family Feed

Just as I was finding out about Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary) or whatever you are persuaded to believe RSS stands for, the publishers of a tourist magazine on the Mornington Peninsula, Peninsula Visitor, asked me if I could arrange a twice weekly addition to their Web site of a page based on the script for a brief item on 3MP Radio about "This week on the Peninsula".

The page is at http://visitor.com.au/thisweek.html and is a copied and pasted job from the Word file sent to the radio station. We will get round to automating the process — eventually.

This seemed an ideal first use by me for RSS: push the info to those who want to receive it so they do not have to remember to go back to that page. So, another copy and paste job is done into a file on the Web site called feed.rss and part of that file is reproduced here as Listing 1. It is an ideal template for someone who wants to create a small business or family newsletter. The major point to remember is that in XML all tags have to be both opened and closed.

There are free feed creation programs such as FeedEdit at http://www.banham.cc/ (created by Steve Banham of New South Wales). There is also a free online creation tool at http://www.webreference.com/cgibin/perl/makerss.pl. With a combination of an RSS creation tool such as one of the above and a script to read in info from the RSS file to a normal Web page we are well on the way to automating the Visitor Web site to the
next stage, but that now depends on my overcoming a basic problem of thinking that, because every time I do a Web search on this topic, there have been dramatic advances, it is easy to see procrastination as a virtue.

You can be sure that we will see new easier-to-use aggregators during 2006 and maybe a flood of free feed creation tools (and their incorporation as a feature in web creation programs). But why be a procrastinator like me? Ten minutes spent checking some of the links given here will make you an expert on the newest aspect of the Internet.
 

About the Author
Gordon Woolf is a longtime Melb PC member and author of several books on subjects such as publication production and retail business. Now semi-retired, he runs a small Web hosting business and can be contacted at gwoolf@melbpc.org.au.
 
Reprinted from the Jan / Feb 2006 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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