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The thrust of the two polls I’ve been running over the last few weeks has been to try and subtly feel out whether a simplified intro to the sometimes unintuitive realm of RSS would be useful. It’s hard to say for sure from the polls, but I gathered that there were enough people who either didn’t know about it or didn’t care to try and learn that it might at least be of some value to a couple of people. So here goes.

Part I: What is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simply Syndication.” Yes, it’s kind of a stupid acronym. Then again, most acronyms in the computer industry are pretty stupid. But ignoring what the letters stand for, what RSS really covers is a series of related technologies that allow the content of a site to be broadcast in a way that can be easily read and reformatted by other entities.

The technical mumbo jumbo isn’t really important, what is important is that RSS allows any site that has a Feed—which is a little broadcastable file that contains the content of a site—to interact with a Feed Reader. A Feed Reader can be one of many different things: A small snippet of code attached to something else like another website (see my Netflix and Last.fm lists in the right hand column of ironSoap.org for examples) or an email program or it can be a standalone application that does nothing else but read Feeds.

You will note that most people use RSS the way they use the phrase Kleenex: What they mean is any of several technologies, products and services that work to create, detect, read and deliver Feeds. RSS itself is just one type of Feed, specifically a specification for a Feed format. There are a couple of different versions of the RSS specification as well so you might see something like RSS 2.0 or RSS 1. Another common specification for Feeds is Atom. Generally speaking they are interchangeable and most Feed Readers treat them equally; their only differences lie in the nitty-griity technical details that you don’t need to bother with.

Part II: Why Should I Care About RSS?

RSS is cool, and I can prove it. How many web sites do you visit? 5? 20? 500? 2,000? Let’s say you’re a fairly typical casual web surfer and you check out 25 sites on a semi-regular basis. Some you check maybe once a week or less because they don’t update that much. Others update really sporadically but sometimes there will be a lot of new stuff in a short span of time (like, say, ironSoap.org). A few update all the time (daily) but at different times during the day and one or two update many times per day, every day.

How long does it take you to check 25 sites like that? If you went through all 25 and read the latest stuff, it could take you hours. What if there was a way to check only the sites that had new content? Maybe you could cut the time in half since only maybe 10 of the sites update regularly anyway. What if you could preview the new updates before you ever even went to the site? If several of the sites weren’t devoted to a particular topic and you didn’t always like what they posted, maybe you could save yourself another hour of wasted time.

This is why you should care about RSS: Because surfing the Web is fun but it is also a huge time sink. Anything that lets you surf without wasting time is a very Good Thing. RSS lets you know when the sites you like have something new to read. It lets you preview the new content and decide if you want to go ahead and visit the site. Some RSS Feeds and/or Feed Readers let you view the entire content without having to actually load the site. Mostly RSS gives you the chance to avoid wasting time checking on or loading sites that don’t have anything to say that you haven’t already heard.

Part III: How Do I Get Started?

The first thing you’ll need is a few Feeds. If you use a modern browser like Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer 7 (which is still in Beta mode, by the way), there is typically a notification method whenever you visit a site that offers a Feed. In Firefox it looks something like this: An orange square with a “broadcasting” dot. The Safari icon is simply a blue rectangle with the letters RSS. IE7 is reported to use the Firefox icon, but I can’t be sure because IE7 Beta requires XP Service Pack 2 and I only have SP1. (It looks from this Microsoft article that the IE7 icon is a minor variation on the Firefox broadcasting dot icon.)

If you’re still using IE6, you may need to do a little looking. There are plugins available for IE (such as Pluck) which allow it to mimic the features of Firefox and Safari, but it doesn’t hurt to be able to locate RSS feeds on your own.

The easiest way to do this is to look for an RSS icon on a site. Most sites use either an icon that looks like the Firefox RSS icon or an orange XML button. Before you start getting confused, you can safely assume that in this case XML is completely synonymous with RSS; in fact RSS is a specific type of XML if you want to be technical. Usually clicking these icons will either bring you to a page that lists the various different Feeds the site offers or they will open the feed itself.

Looking at a Feed in a Web Browser that doesn’t actively support Feeds (like IE6) will result in something that looks like some sort of bizarre code. That’s okay, you don’t need to worry about what’s in the Feed, you just need to know how to get there. If you do see something like the code, you’ve located the Feed so now you just want the Feed’s address. The address is the same as a site address (http://www.somesite.com/somefile…); this is what you’ll want to provide to your Feed Reader so it knows where to go look for the updates to the Feeds.

Other sites use a variety of different methods of describing their Feeds: They may have a variety of different icons, logos, textual links or in some cases, no indication at all that they offer Feeds. We’ll deal with those particularly insidious sites in a moment, but in the meantime the best thing to do is search over a site (especially in the fine print areas since Feeds are typically considered to be extraneous once you’re actually on the site) and see if you can find something that looks like it has something to do with RSS, Atom, XML, Syndication or Feeds. If you can locate the Feed and copy it’s address, you’re halfway there. If you can’t find it, your best bet is probably to email the site’s Webmaster and ask if they have a Feed and if not, what their problem is! Sites without Feeds are pretty rare these days, especially if the site has any kind of updating content. Also keep in mind that some sites have Feeds that are only for specific parts of the site and you may need to navigate to those sections before you can find any Feed links.

Part IV: So, Uh, What Do I Do With This Silly Feed Address?

So you have a Feed. You’re halfway there! Of course, having a Feed address is pretty useless unless you can provide it to a Feed Reader and have that do the heavy lifting for you. That’s what this is all about anyway, having software check your favorite sites for you.

Feed Readers these days are a dime a dozen. We’ll take a look at just three, but the basics will be regardless of which program you decide to go with. The three we’ll check out are Thunderbird (it is to Outlook Express what Firefox is to Internet Explorer and made by the same people), Firefox and RSS Bandit. This should show the three most common types of Feed Readers: Email client-style, browser-style and standalone.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird looks a lot like the familiar Outlook Express. For our purposes we’ll want to Create A New Account in Thunderbird. When the Account Wizard comes up, select “RSS News & Blogs” and click Next. Name the account and click Next again, then click Finish. Now there should be a new item in your left hand pane that looks somewhat like a new Mailbox. If you right-click on the new account name and choose Manage Subscriptions… from the menu, a RSS Subscriptions box will appear. From here, click Add and when it asks for the Feed URL, paste in the Feed address you found from your favorite site (see Part III). Once you click OK, Thunderbird will verify the Feed and load the most recent content. If you close the RSS Subscriptions box and go back to your new RSS News & Blogs account, you should see a new item under there for the site you just added. It should have a number after the name in parentheses.

You should get used to seeing this parenthetical number when dealing with Feeds: They represent the number of new articles/entries for the site since the last time you checked on the Feed. In this case the Feed is new so you’ll see a fairly high number. If you open that site’s entry you should see the site updates listed like new emails. As you click through them, the headlines (subjects) will un-bold just like a read email and the content of the update will appear in the lower pane. Once you read or click on all the articles you should see the parenthetical number disappear. Next time the site updates and you check your Thunderbird, you will see a new (1) after the site name, indicating that there is new content for you to read. Sweet!

RSS Bandit

RSS Bandit is kind of like an email program, too, except that it is strictly dedicated to Feeds. RSS Bandit comes with some feeds pre-installed. You can click through and see RSS Bandit check the status of these feeds and return the most recent updates to those sites. To add your own feed (that you located and carefully copied the address for in Part III), click the New… button in the upper left. The Add Subscription Wizard will appear and you can click Next. The Wizard then asks you for a URL (address) for a feed. But that’s way too easy… you could just paste the address you have.

Instead let’s try Auto Discovery. Check the Autodiscover and Verifty Feed box (if it isn’t already) and instead of pasting in the Feed you found (you can do that later), type in http://puckupdate.com/. PuckUpdate is a pretty cool hockey blog which up until recently didn’t have a clear way to locate the site Feed. Now hit Next. RSS Bandit does what a lot of the newer and more feature-rich Feed Readers does which is search an entire site for Feeds for you. After a progress bar indicating that the search is underway RSS Bandit will locate PuckUpdate’s Feed and ask you if you want to change the title or re-categorize the Feed. Click Next when you’re done and you’ll be presented with a login option.

Some advanced Feeds for sites with subscription content have enabled login routines to access their Feeds. This allows them to offer Feeds of their premium content without having to let non-subscribers read their for-pay stuff. In this case the PuckUpdate Feed (like most) is free, so you can click Next. RSS Bandit has several advanced features specific to the fact that it is dedicated to delivering Feed content. You can safely ignore most of the next screen but you may want to note the “Update frequency” option.

Feed Readers work by periodically checking on the status of the Feed(s) they are subscribed to. They can compare the copy they have most recently accessed to the version currently resting on the server and that’s how they determine if the site has been updated or not. You could set the update frequency to something very small like one minute. But that’s sort of like loading a web page and hitting the Refresh button on your browser once per minute. If enough people did this the site would probably crash! Most Feed Readers default to about once per hour, which is fairly reasonable. But you can customize this based on the site itself. For example, Slashdot.org updates probably three times per hour. If you wanted to know fairly soon after an update hit that site, you might change the update frequency to 15 minutes. On the other hand, a site that updates weekly (but irregularly) might be set to check in once every 24 hours. And of course you can always change the update frequency after the fact.

The next screen talks about formatters: One of the key features of newer Feeds is that they contain much or all of the content of the site updates. This means that technically, you never have to visit the site in question in person; you just get the information/content and read it in your Feed Reader. Because of this you could also re-format that content however you want. In this case we won’t bother, so just click Next and then click Finish.

Now if you check under the Blogs folder in the Feeds pane on the main RSS Bandit window, you’ll see PuckUpdate listed there with all the latest hockey news. Aren’t you lucky?

FireFox

So now you know how to successfully add a regular Feed to a Reader, you can do autodiscovery… what else is there?

Well if you use a browser like Firefox you can get “smart” bookmarks that will give you quick and easy links to new content on your favorite bookmarked sites. Of course, it accomplishes this through Feeds. In Firefox it couldn’t be easier: When you browse to a site that offers a Feed, the icon will appear in the right side of the Address Bar. If you click that icon, you’ll get an Add Live Bookmark dialog box. The Feed address is already filled in for you, all you need to do is give it a name and choose a location. If you choose Bookmarks Toolbar Folder the bookmark along with the Feed icon will appear below the Address Bar; clicking the title will show a dropdown list of recent article headlines and clicking one will bring you to the content in question.

If you need to know what the Feed address is for that particular Live Bookmark, right-click the bookmark and choose Properties… and the address is found under Feed Location. You can copy this and paste it into RSS Bandit, Thunderbird or any other Feed Reader that happens to strike your fancy.

Part V: Now What?

At this point you should be able to locate and use basic Feeds. Of course there is a lot more you can do from there, including adding Feeds to your own site or using Feeds on sites you may have set as your home page (like Netvibes or My Yahoo!). There are also sites like Feedburner that act as a buffer between Feeds and the sites they represent in order to provide site owners with detailed statistics about who is using their Feeds and how. Most of this is comparatively advanced but once you get comfortable with the idea of Feeds in general, you may never use the Web the same way again.

Happy Feeding!

Questions, comments or requests for clarification are welcome. Please leave a comment or email the author.

I am not a brave person. Although at the time I didn’t particularly see myself as such, I reflect on my childhood as being full of jittery, frightened moments. I was a small and rather timid child, slight in stature and composition and also courage. I didn’t particularly care for most creepy crawly things that boys are often associated with and while I had a pretty big mouth (good for getting oneself into frightening situations) I had no spine to back it up with and spent a lot of time fleeing moments that looked like they may come out badly.

The first moment I recall experiencing genuine fear was as a small child in the first home I remember: A little three bedroom number in San Leandro right underneath the BART tracks. It had a detached garage that sat near the back of the property so we had a fairly long driveway that was open to the neighbor’s identical driveway. I don’t recall my parents spending a lot of time talking to the neighbors… my memory pegs them as vaguely white trash in disposition, but they had a young son whom I remember playing with on occasion in our practically shared driveways.

I can’t say how old he was at the time, I must have been four or five so I’m guessing he was maybe ten. He was older and I dimly recall thinking of him as a friend for some time although later I would think of him only in terms of what a ruthlessly cruel tormentor he became. He decided one day to scare me by donning a mask and poking his head over his back fence (which looked out over the driveways where we had been playing). The mask wasn’t particularly scary, but he just stood there, staring at me. At first I was nonplussed but unconcerned, and I implored him to quit clowning and get back to the game. But he remained still, coldly watching and making phony but eerily muffled growling noises. After a few moments of this he disappeared behind the fence once again.

It took me a few minutes to puzzle out that it was possible that the creature over the fence wasn’t my neighbor (Shannon) at all, but in fact someone or something else entirely. I fled into my backyard through the open fence gate and all the way to the other side of the house where I crouched in the side yard for a few minutes, peeking out just enough to see past our gate and to the neighbor’s fence. Eventually the monster reappeared, this time looking around. For me.

I waited it out for a while until the monster disappeared and I heard Shannon emerge from his house again. I ran back out to see what was up. He acted like he had no clue what I was talking about. I tried to convince him for a while and eventually he said he’d go see what was up. He went back into the house and a few moments later the monster appeared over the fence. At this time I was no longer sure it was some person in a goofy Halloween mask, it was clearly some malevolent being who had some sort of interest in me personally. Clearly this interest could lead to no good, so I did what any other mostly chicken five year old would do when presented with this new and frightening development: I ran inside to tell mommy.

Eventually I wandered, timidly, back outside and found Shannon there, wondering where I was. I asked him what had happened and he made up some story about scaring off some other kid by hitting him in the head with a rock. I accepted the story for the most part, but I kept a close eye on that fence from then until really the day we moved.

After that time there were at least two other incidents where someone—undoubtedly Shannon—would wait until I was outside and then don some sort of mask or another and poke his head through the window or push aside the curtains to frighten me.

And it worked. I specifically remember being shocked by a skeletal mask at one point and storming into the house in tears telling my parents that I wanted to move. Their response was typical of an adult who is weary of dealing with a skittish kid who has nothing better to be frightened of than a stupid rubber mask: Shut up and stop being a baby.

We moved out of that house when I was nine years old. In the time between the mask incident with Shannon and our move, two other events conspired to make sleep a difficult task: For one, I saw Cloak and Dagger in the movie theater (strangely I recall this being a double feature with The Jungle Book). The movie isn’t scary, so don’t misunderstand. It’s not like my parents took me to see Poltergeist or anything: Cloak and Dagger was kind of like WarGames or Tron only with spies and detectives instead of crazy computers or living video games. But what got me was that near the beginning a man is pushed to his death over a stairwell. He falls and naturally dies. There is some complication shortly thereafter where the body is not found or the man who supposedly dies is seen walking back up the stairs—it was too much for my young mind to comprehend. But I do recall the plummet of that man to his death as being the most intensely frightening thing I could think of.

Another thing I saw was a few short seconds of the television miniseries V. Of course the part I saw included one of the lizard-like aliens with half his human disguise ripped off in long ribbons of pseudo flesh with the green scaly true face poking out from beneath. I wasn’t allowed to watch the show but a mis-timed request for water or a poorly thought out sense of curiosity had lasting impressions.

To my parents credit they were pretty patient with me. As a six or seven year old with nightmares, sleep was not high on my priority list and they tried their best to console me and be understanding when possible. I recall that it finally got out of hand, keeping my father up or waking him up probably for the 20th time in the same night and I recall him clearly warning me that it was all fine and I was safe and nothing was going to happen to me but if I woke him up again he would not come to my “rescue”, my only recourse was to try and be brave. I was hurt by this but it finally sunk in that my fear was something that should not be shared with anyone. Since bravery was not my strong suit, my actual recourse was unpleasant sleeplessness for many, many nights.

I bring all this up because of a thread over on Fark discussing early childhood terrors (specifically due to movies or TV shows) that would be silly when watched now. I want to point out how strange it was that some of the things that seem to be quite commonly disturbing to children, such as The Wizard of Oz (the flying monkeys seem to do it for most people) or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, really bothered me that much. The tunnel scene in Wonka was a bit grotesque but not frightening by any stretch and I don’t remember having much of a problem with Oz at all except maybe staying awake through the whole thing.

But you also have to understand that my timidness as a child was so pervasive that my parents had to strictly monitor what I could watch on TV. Anything that smacked of monsters or creep-outs was a big no-no (due I’m sure to my previous penchant for keeping them awake all night anytime I got the slightest bit spooked) and since they weren’t particularly interested in scary movies, I didn’t watch a lot of these movies as a kid.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t find other stuff to be afraid of. One of my favorite cartoons as a kid was G.I. Joe. Despite the fact that it was a military cartoon and everyone carried around guns all the time, no one really ever got hurt (how’s that for teaching the “fun” of war to little kids?). For the most part it was fine, but there was one two-part episode that originally aired in 1985 called There’s No Place Like Springfield that was this surreal, Twilight Zone-style mind trip (for an 11 year old, at least). I remember it being not exactly scary but more unnerving.

At one point I came in halfway through Something Wicked This Way Comes and witnessed little more than the film’s antagonist, Mr. Dark, opening his palm to reveal a demonic symbol etched/tattooed into it (perhaps a pentagram… I can’t truly recall). It scared me quite a bit and I can recall several nightmares springing forth from that image which included an identical or very similar scene where a sinister man’s palm revealed his true nature. I have honestly never actually seen the full movie of Something Wicked to this day.

I remember watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries one night. The show was pretty creepy in general but this was a bit later, around late Junior High I believe, so I was more or less over the standard ghost stories and alien abduction tales as sources for real nighttime fear. But this episode featured a re-enactment of a satanic cult meeting where they were sacrificing dogs and killing babies or something along those lines. It totally weirded me out to the point where I spent most of another night somewhere between sleepless and plunged into nightmare.

The point of all this is that I spent quite a large chunk of childhood being afraid of the dark, trying to cope with vivid nightmares and having a lot of sharply unpleasant experiences with fear. Strange then that I decided to start reading Stephen King novels.

Actually it started before then. In about sixth grade I picked up a book by John Bellairs called The House With a Clock in Its Walls which I’ve since gone back and read and found to be rather… mundane. But at the time it was seriously creepy and atmospheric and left me crowding myself under the covers for several weeks.

I’m not sure why I kept reading, why I continued to put myself into a state of trembling paranoia with these stories. Gallons of ink have been spilled trying to decipher the human tendency to seek out certain types of fear, to embrace it in some ways. Not everyone is like this, mind. Nikki steadfastly refuses to read or watch or play part in activities that lead to terror. But perhaps it isn’t so completely out of character for me. After all, I’m the kid who practically broke down in tears as a little squirt because I was too short to go on the scariest, twistiest ride in the amusement park near our house. And from the moment I was finally able to just push up on my tiptoes enough to cross a few straggling, cowlicked hair strands above the cursed line marking who could and could not ride, I felt the exhilarating rush of the steep drop into the double loops and the whizzing turns that led to the heart-stopping corkscrew and I loved every second of it.

In spite of my general timidness, there was always something about me that made me hate the fear, made me want to face it instead of running and hiding. Some twenty-five years later, I’m more or less over the mask-over-the-fence incident, but for a long while I looked back on my flight and cowardice as hideously shameful acts, taunting in their remembered humiliation. I had been tricked by a cruel neighbor kid and had not been able to shake that fear for many, many years.

Perhaps in a way I started reading scary stories and watching scary movies as a way of facing that kid in the mask via proxy. If I could watch the horror show and sleep soundly that night, maybe it would mean that Shannon wasn’t still haunting me with his pale, hollow mask and uncreative grunting growls. If I made it through The Shining, it might mean I wasn’t a sissy after all. In doing so, in facing the fear, I found something strange. It was fun, kind of like a roller coaster. If you let yourself believe just a little bit and you stretched your imagination some, you could get those nervous chills and the heart-jumping frights but as soon as the book cover closed or the house lights came up, it seemed silly and unimportant. Like stepping off a ride. Fear was replaced with calm reason and a tiny bit of regret. It was over, maybe a little too soon.

I’m still not brave. I have yet to overcome my biggest fear (a completely irrational one I’ve discussed before which can’t be combated in the same way as regular chills because there is no “reality” to step back into when it’s over… the reality is there when the fear is triggered) which is not a surge of adrenaline but a direct evokation of the fight or flight response. But these days the scary movies and creep-out books and survival horror video games are some of my favorites. Excepting the dreams where I’m underwater, I actually enjoy the rare nightmare I have to a certain degree. The imaginative ones, like where zombies are chasing me through my apartment complex which suddenly becomes a particular street corner in San Francisco and the crazy guy who hides behind a broken tree branch outside of Joe’s Crab Shack and scares passerby walks up to me and offers a fistful of thumbtacks as my only defense against the crushing hordes of the undead: Those I like. They’re fun in a “I’m starring in a movie in my head” kind of way. Once you wake up, of course.

These days there isn’t much that really scares me when it comes to entertainment. Modern horror movies go more for the gross out than the real scare. The Sixth Sense was good because it was actually a nerve-wracking experience. More movies should be like that. I like watching old black and white horror movies now more than the modern ones: They aren’t really scary to me either but at least they have a sense of fun about them. Few books I’ve read lately have had much impact. Maybe I’m getting so old that I’m just over the idea of monsters in the closet. For as much as my formative years were spent being afraid of the dark, I needed only step into a bit and realize it was not so bad. It could, in fact, be kind of fun.

Update: The text of this article has changed from the original to better reflect the facts of my childhood nightmares. See the comments section for a complete explanation.

So what about you? What scared you as a kid? Did you get over it? Leave a comment or drop me a note.