HOW TO USE AN RSS AGGREGATOR WITHOUT BEING LAMER ABOUT IT
So I was talking to B Cool when I was in Wellington over the weekend and I was saying something about RSS readers (aggregators). You may have noticed that the other I utilized some of my spare time and got a couple of RSS feed links up in the sidebar.
There are heaps and heaps and heaps of RSS readers out in the big, bad world of the Internet. Opera has one built into the browser that I have used in the past. I’m not going to bother going through a comparison of them because that would be uninteresting and not fun for me.
The RSS reader I use right now is Google Reader. Gmail is the best webmail provider in my opinion and there are a suite of online applications that work really well with Gmail. One of them is Google Reader. Up the top of your Gmail page is a list of links: Gmail, Calendar, Documents etc. Clicking on “Reader” takes you to something that basically looks like Gmail. This integration is one of the reasons I use GReader (This is not actually what it is called but it is what I use as a keyword in Firefox so I can get there quickly). I don’t know exactly what it will look like because I never saw mine before I’d subscribed to anything.
Yeah, so go to some site with an RSS feed (like this one omg omg omg omg) and click on the button. Choose “Google Reader” to subscribe to posts and you’ll be able to read whatever gets updated in your RSS aggregator.
Good Things About RSS Readers
1) Useful for sites that update irregularly.
2) I don’t necessarily like going to all of my bookmarks for blogs and webcomics every time I get on the Internet.
3) Some sites suck and it is better to read whatever they write in GReader. Questionable Content is one of these.
4) GReader automatically shows the blogs that you “follow” with your Blogger account.
Annoying Things About RSS Readers
1) Some sites are good and you miss out on seeing if they update or add links in a sidebar or something.
2) Sites are organised differently and this may mean that images that look good on the original site may look retarded in your reader.
3) Some readers don’t display embedded media.
4) If you like a reader because it makes all of the Internet look the same then you are kind of missing out on a lot of the Internet.
5) Some RSS feeds (what your reader shows you) don’t display the actual content. This happens with the Cyanide and Happiness feed. I think this is because GReader doesn’t display .gif images.
In closing: Oh, man. I hate auto-tune so bad it is killing me.
Go on, whine about it.