While I’m a great advocate for time management, I still like to keep up to date with what’s happening in the areas I have greatest interest in.
I love to know about Mac Hints, Hardware, Search Engine Optimisation, Marketing, Wine, Blogging, Mac and Windows Software as well as General Life Enhancements. How do I have time to research and keep abreast of information on all those topics? The answer is via aggregated RSS feeds.

RSS - Another acronym

RSS - another acronym for you all to remember. Simply put, it’s Rich Site Summary and is a format for delivering web content that changes regularly. It’s probably the most common and favourite mechanisms to deliver fresh content by news-related sites, weblogs and any other web-based publisher syndicating their content.

The Benefit

In a nutshell, RSS solves a problem. For people like you who often use the web for all manner of things, it can be rather difficult to keep track of all your favourite sites and their content … especially if those sites are information sites where content changes quickly. RSS saves you time (here’s my productivity kicking in again) as you don’t actually need to visit each site individually. As an added bonus, your privacy is also ensured since there’s no need to commit your personal details to ‘hook into’ a site’s RSS feed … no need to join each site’s email newsletter.

The next step is to use some easy and free software so you’re able to aggregate all the RSS feeds into a neat and tidy package. Saves time, saves energy.

Choices

Like most software areas, there’s a huge variety of RSS readers and for all platforms.
A good one to try initially is previously commercial products from Newsgator which is now freeware and available for both Windows and Mac. Click on over to http://www.newsgator.com and follow the left navigation for Free Stuff > RSS Readers. Choose FeedDemon (for Windows) or NetNewsWire (for Mac).
There are also a number of web-based RSS feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers. If your preferences is web based software, try these out to suit your needs.

Add Them In

Now that you’ve downloaded and installed your brand new RSS Reader, it’s just a small matter of finding your favourite sites and adding in their syndicated RSS content. Most of these sites will display a small icon with the acronum RSS, XML or RDF. These basically tell you they have a feed available for you to add.

Once added, the Reader software will start to aggregate the content of the site you just added and refresh that content at predefined short intervals (this refresh time is configurable too). Selecting each top level site feed then displays a one line ‘subject line’ that is easy to scan through for interesting material. Click on the subject line reveals a short summary of the article and in a lot of cases contains all the info you need. You can further open the actual site’s web page for that content item if you like too.