RSS is the acronym for Rich Site Summary. It is a means of “syndicating” content. Websites can publish their latest news using RSS-feeds, and other pages can display these news as part of their site. (Think of an airline that shows current weather-data, or an online-bookstore that features book-reviews they get from a content-provider).

But there is also another application of RSS-feeds. They can be viewed by themselves with a programm called “aggregator”. Aggregators read feeds and display them for you in a window, as moving text at the bottom of the screen, or in a format that closely resembles E-Mail.

Using these programs, you can stay up-to-date with changes to sites like LBo, GrokLaw, and many others that publish their page-changes via RSS. Like that, every time a page on LBo changes, you see it in your RSS-Reader (=aggregator).

Most sites offering RSS have a little orange icon with “RSS” or “XML” written in it that links to the page. Thunderbird display an orange icon in the bottom to indicate a feed.

Here is a short page on RSS to give you and idea of what it is: http://blogspace.com/rss/readers

The feed link for LBo is in the “rss” link right under the Search box at the top right of each page on our site. The URL is: http://linuxbasics.org/feed.php.

There is a list of aggregators there, but quite frankly, I would not be using RSS if I didn’t have it built in to Thunderbird which I’m using for email in both Linux and Windows. I have also used Sage which can be had as an extension in the Firefox browser. I’ve heard rumors that the next version of Internet Explorer will have an aggregator.

RSS on Thunderbird looks just like email. You will have a folder of your chosen feeds and when there is a change on the site, you get what looks like an email.

To set the RSS folder up on Thunderbird:

• Go to Tools/Account Settings.
• Click on “Add Account” and choose “RSS News and Blogs”.
• Use the default name or name it whatever you want.
• Click Next and Finish.

Now in your list of accounts you will see “News & Blogs” or whatever you named it.

• Highlight that account name and from the menu on the right choose “Manage Subscriptions”
• Choose “Add” and put in the feed address.
• Choose summary if that is all you want.
• Click OK and it should find the name of the Blog/News feed.
• A subfolder for the feed should appear in the RSS folder.

To get our feed address, you just right click on “rss” under the Search at the top of the page and save the link location.

Screenshot of RSS on Thunderbird

Sage is a little different. You go to the site and then bring up Sage in the Tools of Firefox browser. Then you click on the search within Sage and it will find any feeds available. You then add the feed if you want it and it is added to your list of feeds in Sage.

Sage-feeds are stored in the regular Firefox-bookmarks in a subfolder called “Sage Feeds”. So you can easily add a feed to this folder if you know the URL without using the “Search feed” option.

Like an E-Mail-client, sage has the window split in three section. The first section shows which feeds are being watched (=bookmarked), by clicking on a feed, the headlines (=modified pages) are shown in the second section, and a feed-overview in the third. New modifications are displayed in bold typeface. When you click on a headline, the corresponding webpage is loaded.

Screenshot of Sage in action

You can keep all your feeds on line with Google Reader. If you have a Google Home Page the Reader can be incorporated into it. This is great if you tend to read RSS feeds from different computers. You always know which ones you’ve already looked at.

— Anita Lewis 2005/06/26 17:39
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— Stefan Waidele jun. 2005/07/05 19:26