AKA: Sharing Is Caring.

I’m writing this partly because I’d like to help people shift gear, and partly because many of my friends read interesting things online every day and I’m a nosy bastard and don’t have enough crap to read.

In ancient times, back when stone was being beaten into simple tools and wheels were being invented, people read their news on large sheets of pulp. The papers would even be delivered to your house so that you didn’t have to venture farther past your over-grown, under-loved garden, and you could find out how the world devolved today before you even had pants on.

Fast forward to the end of the 20th century, and news was being displayed as pixels on computer screens. The problem with this was that you had to visit various different sites. Bookmarking them all, and visiting, waiting for their epileptic-fit-inducing banner ads to display before you could even get a list of the available articles. So some days you’d forget, and some days you’d spend in bed recovering from yesterday’s seizures.

In their infancy, news sites offered email updates, but people are at the point now where they get enough crap in their inboxes and don’t want to give out their private info yet again to be on more spam lists. So this feature didn’t really gain the popularity that sites had hoped for.

However, over the years, news sites, and blogs, webcomics, and any other site you care to name that had regularly updated content started syndicating their news by way of RSS feeds. It’s at the point now where any site worth its cream doughnuts has an RSS feed (or 12).

In its simplest terms, an RSS feed is a list of articles/posts/news items/whatever posted onto a particular site. You can then subscribe to the RSS feed and using an RSS reader, you can have all the news headlines waiting for you at your leisure. For instance, some news sites, like Stuff allow you to subscribe separately to the technology news, the sports news, the world news, etc. So if you don’t care about the latest info about homoerotic bumfingerers who throw balls around, then you needn’t worry yourself. You won’t see any of it.

So how does an RSS feed work? Well, in the right hand side of your browser’s address bar, you’ll see an orange icon that looks like a dot with two waves coming off it that looks a little like this: . Click on that little guy and you’ll be taken to a page that lists the feed, and instructions on how to subscribe to it. Note that subscribing to RSS feeds is possible without giving over your contact details — my favourite part.

What you will need is an RSS reader. You can get readers for any OS under the sun to run on your local machine, but my favourite is web based because I can access it from anywhere and it always has my content. My favourite is Google’s Reader. You need a GMail account, which I thoroughly recommend as the best webmail system on the planet (assuming you want lots of space, incredible flexibility to tag messages, and almost zero spam). Another option is something like Feedly. Google is your friend; find something that suits you, but one feature your reader should have is the ability to share news.

We all love to share, and we all like to point out interesting things for our friends to read. Google Reader and Feedly allow you to build an RSS feed of your own that your friends can subscribe to (or “follow” in Google Reader parlance). Reader even allows you to share comments or one-off notes for your friends to read, so it effectively includes blog functionality.

So now we’re in a position where any web content we want (except for that from very backward sites) can be delivered right to us. We can read it all at our leisure, and some readers even allow the content to be downloaded so it can be read off-line. About to go on a trip with only your laptop and only a spare pair of gruts? No problemo. You can has ur news too. In addition to that, you can syndicate your own news feeds for your friends by sharing links from your feeds so that they get to read the stuff you find interesting.

Google Reader even has a nice new function in which you can create “feed bundles.” Look in my right hand sidebar here on this site. “Linux / Tech geeks”, “Rational Thinkers”, and “Great Webcomics” are three bundles I’ve created and shared. You can click on their subscribe buttons and you’ll be subscribed to all of the feeds in the bundle.

This really is the way we read news (and blogs, and comics, and…) today. So if you read interesting things you’d like to share with your friends and you would like that process to be easier than copying a link, emailing, trying to come up with a clever and original way of saying “read this”; or if you don’t like sharing links because you don’t like spamming your friends, then RSS is the most polite way of doing it. If they subscribe, or follow you, then they’ll access your favourite links in their own time, in addition to being able to share stuff back to you in a polite manner.

It’s a win-win.

And if you have a website that doesn’t offer an RSS feed, then look into it. I’m pretty sure every blogging/CMS platform on the planet now has it (inbuilt or via a plugin).