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The Phelps Group is Los Angeles' only agency on the Advertising and PR charts.

Are you up to speed with RSS?

Sep 01 2005  • 
You've probably seen these RSS and XML buttons on some of your favorite web sites. If you haven’t yet explored how they can help you keep up-to-date on your favorite sites without leaving your desktop, here's a quick primer to get you up and running. Remember, it's called Really Simple for a reason!

These buttons indicate that the site is offering an RSS feed. A subscription to an RSS feed is free, and allows you to pull that site's headlines into one program on your computer. This enables you to keep up-to-date on content updates for many sites, without having to visit each site individually.

To get started, you will probably want to install software to manage your RSS feeds. There are plenty of options, but don't let the number of options daunt you. Here are the main categories:

  • Standalone RSS Aggregators are desktop applications that provide a quick and easy way to read current headlines and manage feed subscriptions. Power users may want to pay for a full-featured aggregator, but competent free versions do exist. Editor's Choice: SharpReader: www.sharpreader.net.

  • Web-based readers require no software other than a web browser to accomplish everything that the desktop version can do. The upside is that there's no software to install. The downside is the speed at which you can navigate through the feed articles. Editor's Choices: For Internet Explorer - Bloglines: www.bloglines.com. For Mozilla Firefox - Sage: sage.mozdev.org.

  • Outlook Plug-ins enable you to scan your email and your RSS feeds in one place. Future versions of email clients will probably incorporate this functionality, but currently these generally cost about $30. Editor's Choice: NewsGator: www.newsgator.com.

Once you have your software of choice in place, retrieve feed URLs by clicking the orange RSS or XML buttons on a web site offering a feed, and copy the URL from the browser location, adding it as a new feed in your program. Try this on thephelpsgroup.com and see what really really simple really means.
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