Feed your appetite with RSS

Imagine having every newspaper in the world delivered to you every day. Apart from the logistical issues, it would take the entire day to read even a fraction of them.

Better, then, to pick and choose stories from the best news sites on the web.

Even this takes time, particularly for those with a dial-up internet connection that may struggle to load image-heavy web pages.

So what’s the solution? Well, imagine having the bits that interest you from any paper in the world delivered to your computer as soon as they are published online.

Let’s also throw in alerts about sporting events, concerts, updates to your favourite blogs and websites and news of competitions you might want to enter. Thanks to RSS, it’s possible.

It’s so simple
RSS has been around for a while. It stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a clever bit of web magic that allows all the latest alerts, news and updates – called RSS feeds – from your favourite websites to be collected and sent to your computer.

To do the collecting you’ll need a piece of software called an RSS news reader, unless you’re using a web browser that has this built in, but we’ll come to that later. Any website that displays the RSS, XML or Atom icons makes feeds available to an RSS newsreader. All you have to do is tell the newsreader software the sources (web pages) from which you’d like it to collect feeds.

In this feature, we’ll focus on a newsreader called RSSOwl. It’s easy to set up and use and collects RSS, Atom and XML feeds. Once the download is complete, double-click on the .exe file to start the installation process, following the prompts onscreen.

When you first launch the program a screen similar in layout to the inbox screen of Microsoft Outlook’s email program will appear. Folders containing pre-loaded feeds are displayed in the left-hand pane, labelled and organised by category. These are expandable; just click on the plus sign next to a category folder to view its contents.

We’ll use the News category by way of example. Click on the plus sign next to the folder labelled News. A list of online websites from which RSSOwl has collected feeds will appear. Double-click on the BBC News/News Front page feed – all the recent feeds from the front page of the BBC news site will appear in the top right-hand pane. Each of these relates to a story on the BBC website.

Click on one and a summary of the story will appear in the Preview pane underneath – to jump to the full story online, either double-click on the feed in the top right-hand pane or click on the web link at the top of the Preview pane. Providing the computer is connected to the internet the web page with the full story should appear in the same window. To close the web page, click on the cross at the top of the window.

Feeding time
Once you’ve found your way around the category folders, it’s time to try adding your own RSS feed sources from which RSSOwl will collect.

There are three ways to do this: by dragging-and-dropping the RSS feed icon from a website to the category in the feed reader you want to add it to, by using the search tool built in to RSSOwl, or directly from websites. The first way is self-explanatory but we’ll look at the last two options in more detail.