Jon Sheppard’s Blog

RSS Feeds & Feed Readers

Come on, folks! It’s 2008 – the blogosphere is alive and well and you are more connected to your friends and family than you ever wanted to be. Sure there’s MySpace and Facebook for “keeping in touch” but we bloggers know a better way. We share personal biased opinions without sharing every stinking detail about ourselves (though there are plenty of blogs that do that too!).

How do you keep up with all of your favorite blogs and websites? I hope for your sake that you don’t visit each and every one of those blogs/sites every other day in hopes that maybe some new content has been posted. What a waste of time, right? Especially if your friends are slackers who don’t post regularly. Enter RSS feeds.

What is an RSS feed?

R•S•S feed
noun (pl. -s)
1 Really Simple Syndication is a popular technology for notifying users of updates to content on a website or blog.

Maybe you’ve seen the little orange icon to the right on a site or blog before, it’s the (almost) universal icon for an RSS feed. When you see it on a site or blog, you know that you can subscribe to the site’s RSS feed, but how you might ask? Just click on that little orange icon in the address bar of your web browser. Once you subscribe to an RSS feed you need a way to organize and view the RSS feed. Enter feed readers.

What is a feed reader?

feed•read•er
noun (pl. -s)
1 a client software or a web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, and podcasts in a single location for easy viewing.
2 a necessary tool for individuals who want to stay in the know without wasting a lot of time

A feed reader is to RSS feeds as Microsoft Outlook is to email. Feed readers allow you to see which sites have new content and to preview those new blog posts. Lots of times I read an entire blog post without ever actually visiting the blog. Readers also let you organize related RSS feeds into folders, subscribe to feeds, and share your favorite content with others.

I have only ever used two feed readers, Google reader and the reader built in to Apple’s Mail app, but there are a lot of options out there. I think that Google reader is probably the best reader, but I don’t like having to open my web browser to view my feeds. If you use a different reader, leave a comment and tell me which one it is and why you like it.

Lastly, subscribe to my feed!

Posted in Blogging, Daily Events, The Interwebs | 7 Comments »

TV Links Lives Again!

This is just a follow-up to a past post on TV Links.

My buddy Nathan tipped me off to the new TV Links and I wanted to share the love. As many of you know, TV Links was the premiere online source for streaming online video for free with everything from TV shows to music videos to movies (even movies still in theaters!)

The content available on the new TV Links is nowhere near as extensive as the content on the old TV Links, but I’m sure that it will continue to grow as the site gets more traffic. Once that happens, the site will come under legal fire and get shut down and we will await yet another TV Links site to pop up.

Posted in Daily Events, Radical | 1 Comment »

My Response to the Writer’s Strike

Come on, you guys are KILLING me! I just can’t take another week without a new episode of The Office. I mean seriously, what do you expect me to do? Watch American Idol? The Biggest Loser? I’d rather slit my wrists and do pushups in salt water!

Please settle your disputes, get your monies, and start pumping out new episodes of The Office.

Posted in WTF? | 2 Comments »