A lot of website have syndicated feeds built into them in RSS or XML formats. Mine does. Every LiveJournal page does. Most major newspapers’ sites do. But most people don’t know about them and don’t use them. I’ve known about them for a long time, but most news aggregators I’ve found are more complex than I was willing to deal with.
Yesterday I ran accross Bloglines. It’s free and is very easy to set up. Just sign up, then go to the bottom of their page and click on “Easy Subscribe.” It’ll give you a link that you can drag onto your web browser’s bookmarks bar. Then, whenever you come across a page you want to subscribe to, just click the little subscribe favelet and it’ll be added to your “My Bloglines” page. The site works very well and is very simple, which is precisely what I wanted.
Why? The friends page on LiveJournal is a very handy place to check for updates on your friends’ pages, but is of course restricted to LJ users. A news aggregator like Bloglines works with any page with a feed and checks it once an hour. When there’s an update that page’s name will appear in bold, and you can can click on it to read an excerpt or go to the actual web page. Right now I have all the non-LJ blogs I read plus Wired News and the NY Times set up. Whenever I come across a new page I want to subscribe to, I just click the favelet and I’m all set.
How does one know if a page has an RSS or XML feed? Most have a little orange button on them somewhere. (Mine looks like this.) If in doubt, click the subscribe favelet and see what happens. If Bloglines opens but doesn’t display any entries, the page probably doesn’t have a syndication format set up. Some sites provide entires posts in their feeds, others just use excepts, others offer feeds for both. Personally I prefer exceprts, because it’s easier to skip over entries I don’t think I’m interested in, and because I like to read the post in the context of the actual page.
Oh, one more thing: when you first subscribe to a page in Bloglines, the entries may appear out of date. They’ll refresh within the hour, it just means that Bloglines hadn’t been checking that site regularly.