DailyWake

OK, if you already know about RSS Feeds then you can move on to the next story. For the rest of you that are still reading this, I am going to possibly change the way you browse the internet forever. I am talking about RSS Feeds. You’ve probably heard of RSS or have seen the orange logo over there on the right on another website. I’m going to explain what RSS is all about and why you should be using it. First off, what are RSS Feeds?

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually.

OK, thats the only “technical jargon” that will be used in this story. Hopefully I haven’t lost you. Basically sites that have RSS Feeds are usually news websites. Everytime they post a new story, the story goes to the website, and it is also added to the website’s RSS Feed. People can subscribe to the Feed and view the RSS Feed through any RSS Viewer [like Outlook 2007, Google Reader, FeedReader, NewsGator, My Yahoo, and the list goes on and on]. Personally I use Outlook 2007. I also use Outlook for my email (like most of you guys) which makes it very convenient. Anyways, the RSS Feed is basically a list of the stories on a website. As stories come in, your RSS viewer program updates itself and shows you the new stories. If you are interested in a story, then you can click the “view article” link, and it will take you to that particular story.

In practice, it works like this. I have about 15 websites, that I go to on a daily basis. Instead of visiting each website, I just go to my RSS Viewer program, and I have all of the stories from all of those websites right there in front of me. I can quickly see all of the new stories that have arrived on my favorite websites and choose which ones I want to see, instead of going to each website individually, and browsing through the pages looking for stories I’m interested in.

Subscribing to an RSS Feed is REALLY simple. Of course DailyWake has an RSS Feed, which you should definitely take advantage of. The short video below will take you step by step through the process of adding the DailyWake RSS feed to Outlook 2007. The video might also give you a better understanding of what RSS is all about.

If you have an older version of Outlook, you can still view RSS Feeds in your Outlook, if you purchase this little add-on called NewsGator Inbox [externallink]. Also, you can use one of the other free sites mentioned above in the article.