2. RSS Basics

To do static, one-time searches on the Web, you use one type of tool—a Web browser. (You may not think of your copy of Firefox as a tool, but it is!) To do information trapping, you need a whole other set of tools. Your browser will still come in handy, but its main function is to help you set your traps.

You also need to know about a technology called RSS, which stands for either Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary, depending on who you ask. And it helps to know a little bit about page monitors, for those occasions when RSS won’t do.

This chapter and the next take a close look at what these tools are and how they work. Before diving into the creation of information traps, which you’ll do in Chapter 5, take some time to explore the resources presented in this chapter and Chapter 3, and try some experimenting on your own. When you’re finished, you’ll be fully prepared for integrating the tools into a set of basic information traps in Chapter 5.

For now, let’s focus on RSS and what you can do with it—including even the weird things!

What Is RSS?

RSS is a type of XML. That’s the short answer. But unfortunately, the short answer is not always the most useful one. The long answer is more helpful—it’s important to understand a little about XML in order to fully appreciate the value of RSS.

XML holds the key

Web pages are often written in HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. The “markups” are computer code that looks <like this> and specifies how certain characters, words, and sections of a page should look. An HTML file is simply a text file formatted so that your browser displays it in a certain way.

HTML is just one way to format a text file. Another method is to use eXtensible Markup Language, or XML. Like HTML, an XML file looks like a text file that’s formatted a certain way, but it specifies a lot more than plain, old HTML.

In HTML, the markup tells you what the title of the page is, and there are ways to tell what the keywords and description of the page are. And that’s where it pretty much ends. There is no way to delineate specific information within the content of the page. Take, for example, an HTML page of information about birds. While someone might easily be able to scan the page for information about bird migration, a search engine could not. That’s because the page simply is not formatted in a way for search engines to look at it and determine what part of the content is migration information.

You might do a keyword search for words relevant to migration, but the search engine finding your results might find the keywords anywhere—in the header of a page, in menus, or even in the copyright statement! There’s no way that the search can be restricted to the area of the HTML page concerned with migration. HTML pages simply aren’t structured to allow a search engine to break down the information they hold.

XML takes care of this problem by allowing for additional ways to delineate the information contained in the pages. With XML, you can have a formatting style for a page to display information about birds, so both people and search engines can read it. Why is this important? Because a computer can read not only this particular page about birds, but also ten million other pages about birds formatted in XML. Then from this gathered information, it can build a useful, searchable, outlined chunk of information about birds.

To take this scenario one step further, imagine that a search engine indexed 10,000 pages about birds from several different sites that were formatted in XML. Because of the XML format, you could search for all birds that migrated in November, or all birds that eat seeds. With HTML, you’d have to do keyword searches using words like migration November cardinal and you’d just have to hope you get useful results.

RSS feeds: a type of XML

So how does RSS relate to XML?

RSS is a type of text file, a particular type of XML for page and story summaries that is formatted so that the data is delineated very clearly, and broken down far more than it would be on a regular HTML page. There are more extensive types of RSS that carry all kinds of data, including sound and video files, but this book focuses on basic RSS text files. (Once you begin to trap multimedia, you’ll notice plenty of examples of RSS feeds that carry data in addition to text.)

You’ve probably heard the term RSS feed bantered about. An RSS file is called a feed in the same way that an HTML file is called a Web page. RSS feeds carry summary data about the latest articles on or additions to a Web site. (So in essence, a nicely structured RSS feed summarizes new content that’s often made available in chaotic, unstructured HTML pages.)

The data in an RSS feed is broken down by title and summary, and contains additional information, including when the summary was generated, where it came from, who the author is, what language it’s in, and so on. Some RSS feeds carry only headlines of new information, while others carry summaries—the title of a new article and maybe the first 20 words of that article—while still others are called “full feeds” that contain all the text (and sometimes multimedia) available from a Web site. In other words, you can read the content of a site without having to visit the site at all (Figure 2.1)!

Figure 2.1. The International Herald Tribune offers a bevy of feeds that provides content without your having to visit the Web site.

Anatomy of an RSS Feed

I just described to you what a feed looks like, but let’s consider an actual example.

You’re used to HTML pages, which can look like pretty much anything, limited only by the creativity of the designer. But RSS feeds are much more uniform.

Here’s a part of an RSS feed, a summary of an article that was published on the Book Standard (bookstandard.com). I’m showing you the code of it, which looks very much like the source of an HTML page:

How this information is displayed for you depends on your RSS reader. Browsers all display RSS feeds a little bit differently, just like they display HTML pages a little bit differently (Figures 2.2 and 2.3).

Figure 2.2. The ResearchBuzz RSS feed, which you can view in a Web browser.

Figure 2.3. Other RSS feeds can be tough to read in a Web browser, and require a feed reader.

Even without the fancy display, you can see by reading through the example feed item that it is quite a capsule of information. It has a title, a link, a description, and a publishing date. And this is a very basic item; far more information can be added. Having the information broken out like this makes it very easy for a search engine to organize content by date or title—a nifty capability for information trappers.

The Big “So What?”

If you’ve read Web Search Garage, my book on general Internet searching, you know I have a “So What” test: whenever I hear about a new technology or trend I say, “So what?” The So What is the payoff, or what it’s going to do for me as a searcher. If it’s just nifty technology, that’s fine, but I don’t want to spend too much time playing with technologies that aren’t going to make my searching, exploring, and teaching easier. There’s just too much new technology out there!

The So What for you, in the case of RSS, is saved time. Instead of visiting several Web sites to get their latest articles, you can have an RSS feed reader do it for you and provide a summary or list of site updates. Furthermore, some RSS feeds give you lists of search engine results based on the queries you specify—these are called “keyword-based RSS feeds,” which are very important. (You’ll learn more about these later in the chapter.) So instead of having to run the same search over and over again (on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis), the RSS feed will automatically update itself and provide you with updated results and new content.

Let’s look at a real-life, full-blown RSS feed scenario. I use NewsGator Online (newsgator.com) as my RSS feed reader. An RSS feed reader, like an HTML Web browser (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), formats RSS feeds so that people, as well as computers, can read them. My RSS feed reader has about 100 RSS feeds—summary information about new additions to content on about 100 Web sites.

Can you imagine how long it would take me to visit every last one of those sites to see what new content it had? With RSS feeds and the online feed reader, however, I can skim through these sites in an hour or so.

RSS can save you lots and lots of time by showing you only new and updated content from Web sites.

RSS is the cornerstone of any information-trapping strategy. RSS feeds are compact, focus on content, and contain a lot of clearly delineated information—the essential parts of the data flow you monitor. There will be times when you have to look at the content of entire Web pages and Web sites instead of using an RSS feed—sometimes RSS feeds aren’t available for the materials in which you’re really interested. But whenever possible, you should use RSS feeds. How to find an RSS feed, and what options you have to read them, is the subject of the rest of this chapter.

Finding RSS Feeds

Of course, you can’t use an RSS feed until you find one. Fortunately, you’ve got several places to look! There are three major places: on RSS-enabled pages themselves, in RSS feed directories (which often allow for extensive searching), and in searchable subject indexes of RSS feeds (which allow for less searching but have feed listings broken down into detailed subcategories).

Keyword-based RSS feeds, which we’ll look at in more detail later in the chapter, are usually created as the result of a search; therefore, there’s not really a place to find them. Instead, you have to investigate the RSS feed sources you come across and see if they have keyword-based RSS feeds available, or use a tool that generates keyword-based RSS feeds.

On the site itself

Many Web sites advertise the fact that they have RSS feeds. Look for either a link that says “RSS feed” or, more commonly, an orange button that says XML on it. There is also a small square orange button that’s getting popular (Figure 2.4).

Figure 2.4. This orange button is becoming a popular way to denote RSS feeds.

Yahoo’s My Yahoo portal feature offers support for RSS feeds, so you might see a My Yahoo button in addition to an RSS Feed button. Many RSS feed readers also have their own style of buttons, which makes it easy to add a feed to that reader with one click. So you might see a plain XML button, and then half-a-dozen of the ones listed for individual feed readers (Figure 2.5). People really like promoting their RSS feeds!

Figure 2.5. Many RSS feeds give you multiple ways to subscribe.

If you already have a particular set of resources in mind that you want to monitor, then I recommend that you visit those sites first to see if they provide RSS feeds. If you don’t have any resources in mind yet, start by looking in RSS feed directories.

RSS feed directories

RSS feed directories are—surprise!—directories of RSS feeds. Despite the fact that RSS has been getting a lot of press for some time, the technology has been going strong for a lot longer, and there are literally millions of feeds out there. You can get RSS feeds from four different sources, beginning with two search engines designed exclusively for RSS feeds.

Feedster

Feedster (feedster.com) is a search engine that indexes RSS feeds. Therefore, any pages you find on Feedster will be connected with an RSS feed.

If your particular interest is fairly obscure or narrowly focused, try searching Feedster first. In the query box, just enter a few keywords that describe your interest. For example, let’s say I’m interested in collecting action figures. I’d plug "action figures" into Feedster.

Look at an example of Feedster’s search results (Figure 2.6). Notice it includes a title, source, number of words, and when the information was actually published. (It can include an exact date of publication because an RSS feed notes that information in a format that a search engine can understand. Three more cheers for RSS!)

Figure 2.6. Feedster’s results give you just enough content to allow a little preview of the blog itself.

Notice, too, that the source of the result is shown at the bottom underneath the “snippet” of the search result. (The snippet usually contains at least one of the keywords for which you were searching.) You might skim the snippet and decide you immediately want to subscribe to the RSS feed. In that case, you can click the orange button just to the right of the word From at the bottom of the entry.

There’s your RSS feed. Sometimes you won’t want to subscribe to that feed, but you may want to read some of the articles on the feed and see what sites the articles refer to. This takes some extra time, but it can pay off by pointing you to sources of information you might not find otherwise.

Syndic8

Syndic8 (syndic8.com) is a bit geekier than Feedster, and is designed only for finding RSS feeds instead of searching for information from RSS feeds. For this reason, Syndic8 provides a lot of information about the feeds it lists.

Look for the Search for Feed query box on the front page (Figure 2.7).

Figure 2.7. Syndic8’s home page.

Here you can do a keyword search just like you could using Feedster’s query box.

Let’s do the same search on Syndic8 that we did with Feedster—for "action figures" (Figure 2.8).

Figure 2.8. Syndic8 highlights the term you’re looking for in your search results.

I received 17 results, ranging from “toy news” to information on character figures. The information includes the language of the feeds (not very useful to get an Italian RSS feed if you don’t speak Italian!). You can also view when the feed was created and when it was changed. In general, if a feed is fairly old (fairly old in Internet terms is a couple of years) and it’s changed in the last few days, you’ve probably found an active feed.

You can get more information about the feed by clicking on the Feed ID number (don’t click on the feed name, which takes you to the feed’s Web site). There’s also information about the last time the feed was “polled” (checked by Syndic8), its RSS version, its status, whether it contains metadata, and so on. A lot of these terms may sound like Greek to you—but rest assured, by the time you’re finished reading this book, RSS parlance will come naturally to you!

Pay attention to the dates on the search results page—an older feed that’s still active usually contains good data, as I mentioned earlier. Be aware of “ghost feeds” that haven’t been updated in years. There are a lot of people out there who enthusiastically start a site, offer RSS feeds, and realize a few months down the road that regularly updating a site requires time and effort. So they give up. You want to be using feeds that are up to date. You won’t often encounter ghost feeds when searching in Feedster, since Feedster lists search results by date. (The feeds that have updated more recently appear at the top of Feedster’s search results.) With Syndic8, however, you want to pay more attention.

You can also see the last entries in the RSS feed (Figure 2.9). Scroll down to the very bottom of the feed information page, and notice there’s a list of the most recent entries and enough of the content to get a good sense of what the feed is about.

Figure 2.9. Syndic8’s feed information pages also include a list of recent additions to the RSS feed.

If you take the time now to vet the feed, making sure it covers your topic of interest, you’ll save yourself from having to remove the feed from all your traps later.

NewsIsFree

NewsIsFree (newsisfree.com) could be considered a combination of Syndic8 and Feedster. You can search sources, like Feedster, but you can also browse sources, like Syndic8. The direct URL for browsing sources is newsisfree.com/sources/bycat.

Take a close look and notice the channels are broken out by category, from Top News to blogs (Figure 2.10).

Figure 2.10. NewsIsFree offers RSS feed listings in a variety of categories.

Pick a category, and you get a list of RSS feed sources, with the most popular ones at the top and the rest listed alphabetically. The category listing gives the name of the feed, category, language, and a brief description. Click on the name of the feed and you get some additional information. At the top of the page, you can see the name of the feed, and there is also an orange XML button on the page—that’s right, a link to the RSS feed (Figure 2.11).

Figure 2.11. Finding the RSS feeds for items listed in NewsIsFree.

I’m mentioning this because the rest of the page can be a bit confusing and you may think that you have to pay to get a link to the RSS feed (which is not the case).

Notice that on the left side of a feed information page there’s a search form for searching the sources of the news on the site (instead of searching the items within the sources).

A search for "action figure" on NewsIsFree brought no results—you might find you have to stick with Syndic8 or Feedster for more specific searches. That’s because NewsIsFree doesn’t seem to have as many sources as Feedster or Syndic8. However, I’ve included it here because it has been around a long time, it offers a unique way of looking at what’s available, and it’s an invaluable resource for keeping up with newly available feeds, which is a topic we return to when we discuss pruning, reevaluating, and adding sources.

Technorati’s Blogfinder

Technorati has a service called Blogfinder (technorati.com/blogs/), which at this writing is still in beta, but you can use it to find RSS feeds as well. (Most blog-creation software nowadays automatically generates RSS feeds.)

Technorati lets you search for blogs using “tags,” which are simply keywords describing the blog. This type of tag search means you need to use more general search words than you might use to search the full content of a blog. "Action figures" is general enough, and you’ll probably get some results. Figure 2.12 shows what those search results look like.

Figure 2.12. Using Technorati’s Blogfinder, you can sort your results two different ways. The Freshness option works well if you’re looking for frequently updated blogs for your information traps.

When I conducted my search, I received eight results, with a name of and a link to the blog, a brief description, the tags associated with the blog, and a note about when the blog was last updated (remember, you don’t want to monitor ghost feeds!). You also get a link that lists who is linking to that blog, and sometimes you’ll see a list of tags at the top of the search results that are related to the one you searched for (in this case, for example, related tags are for Vintage Toys and Star Wars).

Pulling the RSS feeds from the found blogs involves revisiting the site to look for the orange RSS logos or one of the personalized RSS logos from My Yahoo or another site. It takes a little extra work; on the other hand, the tag system makes searching for blogs/RSS feeds on more general subjects easier than using a full-text search engine.

RSS in Searchable Subject Indexes

There are many searchable subject indexes of RSS feeds. A searchable subject index is a directory set up into categories (Figure 2.13).

Figure 2.13. 2RSS, a searchable subject index for RSS feeds.

The categories also have subcategories and sometimes they go into astonishing detail. In addition to being set up into categories, such a directory is also searchable by keywords (think Yahoo Directory). There are literally dozens of searchable subject indexes for RSS feeds—I discuss just a couple of them here.

2RSS

2RSS (2rss.com) goes beyond RSS feeds to offer RSS tools and other RSS-related information. It begins with the directory of RSS feeds, divided into several categories. There are blog and news feeds here, yes, but there are also business feeds, regional feeds, and lists for feeds that were recently added, as well as feeds that are recommended. If you want to get a sense of what RSS feeds look like, try the feed reader (2RSS Reader, at the top of the page)—you don’t have to log in to use it; just choose a feed from the pull-down menu or enter the URL of a feed.

RSS Network

RSS Network (rss-network.com/) offers a directory of RSS feeds, but divides the feeds into several unusual categories, including real estate, shopping, classified, and animal. When browsing results, you can view the RSS feed as a Web page to get a preview of the content, or go straight to the “raw” RSS feed or to the Web site for the feed content.

For 90 percent of your RSS discovery needs, search engines and feed directories will do the trick. There are many of them and the biggest ones frequently add new feeds.

Types of RSS Feeds

So far we’ve been looking at where you can find static RSS feeds—RSS feeds that Web sites make available to provide information about their site or about certain sections of their site. And these static feeds are very useful. But your secret weapon as an information trapper is not the static feed, but the keyword-based feed.

This section is all about the “So what?” I discussed earlier in the chapter. Which type of RSS feed you use can save you gobs and gobs of time and make you look like an information-gathering wizard!

Static feeds

Static feeds are just what they sound like: feeds a site offers that you can’t customize with keywords—what we’ve been talking about up to this point in the chapter. A site may have one static feed available, or hundreds. My Web site ResearchBuzz (researchbuzz.org/wp) has a couple of main feeds with the potential for a feed for each category, which amounts to over 200 feeds—but they’re all static. Static feeds are not the customizable timesavers that keyword-based feeds are, but they’re essential to providing you with general overviews of a topic, or for providing you with information when your interests are too broad for a keyword search.

Static feeds are your starting point. You build your monitoring process by first setting a few information traps of general interest to make sure you get a full sweep of the topic you’re interested in. However, you don’t want to set too many! The idea is to create a manageable flow of information, which you can filter and redirect in whatever way you need.

Keyword-based feeds

Keyword-based feeds are feeds that are generated based on a search. This search can be done on any resource (most people do them on news search engines). The advantage is that you can create your own feeds based on the keywords you’re interested in, feeds that are as narrowly focused as you like. Although most likely you can find RSS feeds that broadly address the topic you’re interested in, a keyword-based RSS feed can help you coax out narrowly focused information. The rest of this chapter talks about where to find keyword-based feeds and what to do with them once you find them.

I hear you out there saying, “So what?” Okay, let’s look at an example: You’re interested in molybdenum mining. You might be able to find RSS feeds about mining, minerals, elements, or chemistry, but I’m pretty sure there’s no Molybdenum Mining Gazette out there. But you could search Yahoo News for molybdenum mining, sort your results by date, and generate a constantly updated RSS feed of molybdenum mining news.

There might not be much news about such a topic, and that’s the entire point. Instead of having to go through more general, very active feeds that change several times a month or possibly several times a day, you’d be reading a feed that might change only a couple times a month. That would be okay, however, because it would be bringing very specific, very focused news to you—the exact news you want.

In later chapters, as we dive further into RSS feeds and where they can be found, we’ll get up close and personal with keyword-based RSS feeds. For now, let’s return to a resource we discussed earlier in the chapter to get a better sense of how this type of feed can help you.

Remember Feedster? Feedster locates static RSS feeds. But it’s also a source of keyword-based RSS feeds. Say you’re a customer-service executive with Pizza Hut, and you want to know what people are saying about Pizza Hut stores. You visit Feedster, and after some experimentation, you settle on the search phrase "pizza hut" "thin crust". Your search results may look like Figure 2.14.

Figure 2.14. Looking for Pizza Hut experiences at Feedster.

Unless one of the blogs you find is called “My Diary of Going to Pizza Hut Every Day,” you’re probably not going to want to monitor each of these blogs. Instead, you can get an RSS feed of Feedster’s results: a keyword-based RSS feed that refreshes every time Feedster finds a new entry in its index that matches "pizza hut" "thin crust". (Look for the “Subscribe to this search” link at the top of the results page.) Feedster is monitoring the part of the blogging world that goes to Pizza Hut so you don’t have to!

Which feed to use and when

How specific can you get when you’re generating an RSS feed? For example, if you’re interested in the New York Giants, there must be a few players or staff members that are of particular interest. The names of those people would be excellent candidates for keyword-based RSS feeds.

If you’re interested, say, in search engines, you could probably stick with the huge number of static RSS feeds devoted to search engines. But maybe you want a keyword-based feed for Teoma, a lesser-known search engine?

If you’re interested in digital archives, you might want to start with a couple of static feeds from archive mailing lists, and then use keyword-based RSS feeds for the rest of your traps, searching Yahoo News for "information mining", for example, or "online archives".

Or say you have a very specific interest, like archives about Pablo Picasso. In this case, you might want to forego static feeds entirely (though there might be one or two about modern art that stir your interest) and use only keyword-based feeds.

Obviously, the fewer traps you have, the easier it is to monitor information flow. At the same time, the fewer traps you have, the more difficult it is to make sure that most of the results are as relevant as possible to your interests (I won’t say all of the results should be as relevant as possible because all is an impossible, and therefore inappropriate, quest).

I am most comfortable when I see some repeated stories in the traps I’ve set—say 5 percent to 10 percent. This rate assures me that I’m covering my bases and getting most of what I can possibly get, without having too many repeats that make it difficult to monitor and act on the data in my traps.

So aim for having just enough overlap between your static feeds, keyword-based feeds, and monitored pages (more about those in the next chapter). “Comprehensive but manageable” is my mantra, as you’ll see in later chapters.

Now that you’ve found all these feeds, you have another problem: reading them. What can you use to actually look at RSS feeds? Well, your Web browser probably has the chops to read an individual feed, but you want a power tool—something that lets you comfortably review dozens (possibly hundreds) of feeds at a time.

RSS Reader Tools

RSS readers fall into two broad categories: tools that let you merely read a single feed (reformatting it so that a person can comfortably read it) and tools that let you read and organize several feeds at a time. Your browser may have the potential to do the first, and many resources are available for doing the second.

RSS readers for many different platforms are available: palmtops and cell phones—and even iPods! You can learn more about options for information trapping on the go by seeing the bonus chapter on page A1 but for now let’s stick with Windows-based and Mac-based options.

Browser tools: Firefox

Which browser do you use? Depending on which one it is, you may have a built-in RSS reader. Eventually all the major browsers will have an easy way to read multiple RSS feeds, but at the moment that’s not the case.

If your browser doesn’t support RSS feeds, let me introduce you to one that does: Firefox.

Firefox, which is available at mozilla.com/firefox/, has many advantages: it’s free, it runs on many different operating systems, it has extensive RSS support, and did I mention it’s free? Firefox also offers many different “extensions,” which allow you to do even more things with RSS, but let’s start with the basics.

Basic RSS on Firefox

Firefox offers a feature called a Live Bookmark, which actually contains an RSS feed that updates periodically. Instead of displaying the entire feed, it displays a list of links to stories within the RSS feed. For example, when Firefox visits a site that has an RSS feed it recognizes, it gives you a little symbol in the address bar, as shown in Figure 2.4.

Click on that link, and you have the option of subscribing to the RSS feed as a Live Bookmark. The Live Bookmark has a symbol beside it, and displays a list of feed items when you hold your cursor over it. Figure 2.15 shows a Live Bookmark for ResearchBuzz. You can click on any of the items to be taken to the ResearchBuzz story for that item.

Figure 2.15. A Live Bookmark for ResearchBuzz.

Sometimes Firefox runs into an RSS feed that it doesn’t recognize as an RSS feed, in which case you can manually make a Live Bookmark out of it. Here’s how:

1. Click the Bookmarks item on your browser menu, and then click the Manage Bookmarks option. The Bookmarks Manager File menu provides the option to add a Live Bookmark.

2. Add any RSS feed you want.

Firefox extensions

Firefox supports additions to the Firefox program that give it additional functionality. There are places to download these extensions all over the Web, but I recommend you get them directly from the Firefox site: https://addons.mozilla.org.

Here I discuss just a couple of useful Firefox extensions related to RSS. For a full overview of all the cool things you can do with Firefox and its extensions, I heartily recommend Firefox and Thunderbird Garage, by John Hedtke, Chris Hofmann, and Marcia Knous.

As of this writing, there are several different RSS extensions on Firefox (probably even more will have been added by the time this book goes to press):

Wizz RSS. I like Wizz RSS, which you can check out at https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=424. Once installed (and it’s a quick install), Wizz RSS lets you read and manage RSS feeds. You can access it from the Tools option on Firefox’s main menu or by pressing Alt + W. It looks a little like a page frame (Figure 2.16). I recommend this solution when you have a low or moderate number of RSS feeds you want to monitor—perhaps you want to put your most critical feeds here so you always have them at hand.

Figure 2.16. Reading RSS with Wizz in Firefox.

I don’t want to give you a huge tutorial on Wizz RSS, but let me make a few points that may not be obvious.

There’s a public and private list in the Wizz RSS panel, which you open by clicking one of the two icons that look like monitor screens in the Wizz toolbar. In order to use the private list, though, you’ll need to have a Wizz account, which you can create from the Options Etc menu on the Wizz toolbar (Figure 2.17).

Figure 2.17. Setting up private lists does give you a little protection for sensitive data, but you’ll have to establish a user name and password first.

The private list requires you to create an account using only a user name and password. This level of security is basic at best, so don’t put anything ultra-sensitive in the private list, where you create your categories of RSS feeds and then populate them with individual feeds.

Once you’ve created a list of feeds you want to monitor, you navigate through this list on the left. When you see an interesting item, click on it, and it appears in the Web page on the right.

When you right-click on the title of an item, you have the option of sharing it via e-mail. To take advantage of this, you need to add your e-mail settings to Wizz RSS. You can add those by accessing Account Options.

Wizz RSS isn’t the most full-featured RSS reader you can use, but it’s simple to integrate into Firefox. And if you already use Firefox, it gives you the ability to use RSS without having to add another tool to your toolbox.

Sage. Another RSS reader for Firefox, Sage is even simpler than Wizz RSS. You can get more information about it at https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=77.

Once installed, Sage looks a little like Wizz RSS (Figure 2.18). However, it doesn’t require an account to add RSS feeds. Adding feeds is as simple as right-clicking and choosing New Bookmark—if you’ve used Firefox’s bookmarks at all, it should be very intuitive for you.

Figure 2.18. Sage lays out an RSS feed, content snippets and all, into easy-to-read boxes.

Sage is integrated with online-resource Technorati, so you can see what other sites are linking to stories you find interesting. In addition, Sage’s options let you toggle a feature to search for feeds (it hooks right into Feedster) and use a custom style sheet for rendering if you don’t use the one Sage provides. I recommend Sage for lightweight feed-wrangling, especially if you don’t want to bother with the account setup requirements for Wizz RSS.

RSS feed readers that integrate with your browser are good because they save you a step. You don’t have to worry about another software package to install or another site to keep up with. On the other hand, they’re not as robust as standalone RSS readers. I recommend them only if you don’t have an extensive number of sites to watch, or if there’s a small, critical number of feeds you want to keep close watch over. Having them right in your browser keeps them close at hand when you need them.

If you’re a Mac user, you might want to check out Safari, Apple’s browser for Mac OS X. Safari 2.0 can automatically detect RSS feeds and save them as bookmarks, letting you know when they’ve been updated. To learn more about Safari’s offerings, check out apple.com/macosx/features/safari/.

Web-based RSS feed readers

A Web-based RSS feed reader is one that you access via a Web site.

Bloglines

Bloglines (bloglines.com) is my favorite Web-based RSS feed reader. But be forewarned: it has an overwhelming number of options. You power users out there will probably jump up and do a little dance. Non-power users may find yourselves just wanting to get on with reading your RSS feeds.

You have to register to use this site. Once you do, and then respond to the confirmation e-mail, it’s time to set up your feeds. Check out My Feeds in the upper left part of the page (Figure 2.19) and notice that there’s already one feed there—for Bloglines itself. You can click Add to add more feeds to the list.

Figure 2.19. Your Bloglines account starts with a feed already in place—for Bloglines News.

You can also browse Bloglines’ directory by clicking the Directory tab on the main part of the page. The directory lets you search by keyword and view a list of the most popular and newest feeds. There’s also a list of all the feeds available in alphabetical order, but because Bloglines has thousands and thousands of feeds, this isn’t particularly useful.

When you do a keyword search, notice you get two kinds of results—RSS feeds for blogs themselves, and results for entries within blog feeds. So, for example, if you search for Starbucks, you might find that there are only a dozen or so blogs with the word Starbucks in their description or title, but thousands and thousands of entries which mention going to Starbucks, their favorite Starbucks drink, etc.

Bloglines can handle hundreds and hundreds of RSS feeds for you. Once you’ve set up the feeds, notice that it looks like a framed page. Your feed lists are on the left. Click on a feed and its content shows up on the right.

From here the possibilities are almost endless, especially for information trappers who are always out to expand their sources. For instance, look at each entry and notice they have individual “Email This” and “Clip/Blog This” links. The “Email This” link does what you’d expect: it gives you a pop-up window where you can fill out an e-mail address to send the entry to and write a message about it. The “Clip/Blog This” link it gives you another pop-up window with an area in which to “clip” the information from the story that you want. After clipping, you can publish it to a “Clip Blog” available at Bloglines, or you can file it in a Bloglines-based clipping file if you want to save it for later.

All of this discussion barely scratches the surface of Bloglines. It’s a sturdy RSS reader—you can cram a lot of feeds into it, it lets you do a lot with those feeds, and it also incorporates extensive feed discovery tools in with the feed reading. If you have a moderate-to-heavy amount of RSS research you want to keep up with, and you use different computers, I can’t recommend Bloglines enough. It’s a great feed reader.

Newsburst

Newsburst (newsburst.com), brought to you by CNET, is a little more intrusive than Bloglines (that is, it asks you a couple of extra questions when you register), but if you can get past that then you’ll probably find that it’s another useful feed reader.

Once you’ve registered, Newsburst presents you with a few feeds apparently based on the zip code you provided when registering. The Add Source tab at the top of the page gives you a way to manually enter RSS feeds you want to read and search for new ones (Figure 2.20).

Figure 2.20. You can either search for additional sources in Newsburst or add your own.

Newsburst gives advanced users who have been using another feed reader the option of uploading an OPML file. An OPML file is a specifically formatted XML file that instead of containing content items from a single RSS feed, contains information about several RSS feeds with no content items. OPML files allow you to import or export lists of RSS feeds from feed readers very quickly.

The default feed display that appears when you first log in to Newsburst is called a “dashboard,” in which all the feed entries are laid out in multiple columns. In contrast, Bloglines’ feed display is called a “stream”—all the feed entries are laid out in one vertical list. You can opt to have either kind of display in Newsburst by clicking Change Preferences on the left side of the screen and then indicating your choice. If you have a smaller number of feeds, you might find that the dashboard display is easier to review and absorb quickly. If you have lots of feeds, you might want the simple, one-at-a-time option of a stream.

My Yahoo

Yahoo has been a major supporter of RSS feeds in the past, so it’s no surprise that the My Yahoo page supports RSS feeds (my.yahoo.com/s/about/rss/index.html). My Yahoo is a little awkward to use if you want to look at a lot of RSS feeds, but if you already use the site anyway and you’re not planning to subscribe to more than a dozen RSS feeds, it’s hands-down the best choice. If you don’t already use My Yahoo, you can register at my.yahoo.com for free.

My Yahoo has many more formatting options than the other readers we’ve discussed so far. You can set up your personalized page to show your local weather forecast. You can display the comic strips you want to read every day. You can set the “theme” for your page (but be careful—you want to choose the one that makes the text easiest to read). You can play around for a while until your page looks the way you want it to—after all, if everything goes well you’ll be visiting your page often to check your traps.

Once you’ve finished setting up your page, you can add some RSS feeds to the page by clicking the Add Content tab (Figure 2.21). You can search for feeds by keyword, add feeds by URL, or check out the most popular feeds and add those. My Yahoo makes this extremely easy—just go to the RSS add page, paste in the URL of the RSS feed you want, click the Add button, and the feed is added to your page.

Figure 2.21. You can browse for, search for, or add your own RSS feeds to My Yahoo.

For the most part, My Yahoo uses a stream layout (vertical lists), and as you add feeds the representation of the page on your left gets longer and longer. After throwing a few dozen feeds at My Yahoo, I was unable to discover a limit to the number of feeds it can handle. If you don’t mind a really long page (or a long load time), you can stack up lots of RSS feeds here.

The advantage of using My Yahoo as an RSS feed reader is that Yahoo has gone out of its way to make the feed reader pleasant and easy-to-use. And if you’re using the site anyway, it’s easy to seamlessly integrate reading your RSS feeds into your usual routine.

There are some drawbacks, however. Yahoo seems to list only five entries from an RSS feed at a time, and lists only the titles, not the descriptions of the articles. So while you may see a lot of entries on the My Yahoo page, they won’t be as informative as smaller pages, which include entry descriptions and more than five feed entry titles at one time.

Client-side RSS feed readers

If you work mainly on one computer and you don’t want to trust your feeds to a Web-based application, then a standalone, or “client-based” RSS feed reader, is the better choice. A standalone RSS feed reader is software that doesn’t integrate or extend a program—instead it “stands alone” to deliver RSS feed managing and reading.

I have two suggestions for a client-based RSS feed reader: one for Windows and one for Mac.

NewzCrawler

NewzCrawler (newzcrawler.com/) is a standalone RSS feed reader. However, it relies on Internet Explorer for some of its features, so it’s best for computers that run on Windows. As you’re installing NewzCrawler, you have the option of installing an RSS Autodiscovery Module, which makes it easier for you to find feeds. But because most Web sites make it quite obvious where their feeds are, and you’ve learned several techniques for finding RSS feeds in this book, you can skip installing the module if you like.

After you’ve finished installing NewzCrawler and started running it for the first time, notice that it already has several RSS feeds installed in that lovely “Feeds located on the left, feed items displayed on the right” structure that you’re probably very used to by now (Figure 2.22). Actually it’s a little bit different. The panel on the right is divided into two parts. The top part shows you a summary of items, while the lower part shows the story from the item itself. From the lower part you can also visit the story on the Web.

Figure 2.22. You can read RSS feeds and monitor Web pages from NewzCrawler.

You may find that you don’t want all of the RSS feeds that NewzCrawler automatically adds to your list. If you want to get rid of them, it’s easy. Just right-click on the feed you want to delete (you can also click the plus sign beside the folders to open the folders and show the feeds) and you’ll be presented with several options. Delete, of course, gets rid of the feed. Catch Up marks all the feed stories that have been read. Many other options are available, but I won’t go into detail here.

To add feeds to NewzCrawler, right-click on any of the items, and at the top of the pop-up menu, choose New. You have the option of adding new folders or new feed items. To update your list, click the green Play button at the top of the page, and all the feeds update. NewzCrawler has a free, two-week trial offer. It costs $24.95 after that.

If you’re not using Windows, you have other options.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire (ranchero.com/netnewswire/) requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 but is compatible with Mac OS X 10.4. It has a typical three-panel layout, like many of the other feed readers we’ve looked at in this chapter, with feeds on the left (it comes preloaded with a bunch of Apple-related feeds), headlines on the top right (double-clicking on the headline takes you straight to the page with the full story), and content (either full-article or snippet) on the bottom right. A “sites drawer” provides a list of RSS feeds to which you may subscribe, while another tool lets you post to a Web log (Figure 2.23).

Figure 2.23. NetNewsWire comes with a lot of Mac-oriented, preinstalled feeds.

In addition to the regular RSS feeds, NetNewsWire also provides a way to subscribe to special headlines, which essentially are keyword-based RSS feeds that we’ve already discussed. There aren’t many options available for keyword-based feeds, but there are a few available for experimentation. Another option, a Smart List, lets you group together all the feed entries that match certain conditions—all the feeds that contain the word “iPod” in the title, for example, or all the feeds that contain the word “medical” in the description. In these cases, you’re conducting keyword searches of only those RSS feeds that you’ve subscribed to!

You’ll also find a Dinosaurs option in the Window menu that shows you a list of feeds that haven’t been updated in at least 30 days—a handy feature you may want to use when the number of feeds you’re using is getting overwhelming. While you may want to keep those really specific keyword-based feeds that aren’t supposed to update that often anyway, blog feeds that aren’t updated at least once a month can be less than useful. Goodbye, empty information traps!

RSS feeds should be the cornerstone of your information trapping strategy. But not all resources you want to monitor have RSS feeds. What do you do at that point? You use another tool: a page monitor. Read on!