patndoris TechnoGeek

Last week, while trying to determine if IT Guy may have already seen a recent Lifehacker post I was speaking of, I innocently asked “Do you RSS?” I was stunned when he said “RSS? That’s SO old school.” Huh? What?!

...

I’ve got a lot on my plate. As a single parent of a teenage male offspring, I spend a lot of time playing chauffer. Between work, home, social sites, trying to keep up with email and fighting malware, I just don’t have the time to spend cruising the internet for hours at a time. I have about 30 sites I follow at the moment, for different reasons, and RSS is the only way I can keep up with them all.

First and foremost, I have RSS sites I depend on to keep things updated.  I use Liberkey for my portable apps, and I track the Amazon Kindle feeds closely so I can grab all my reading materials for free. (Free books one day may have a sell price the next - gotta move fast!) I use RSS as a simple and accurate way to monitor these sites. I also track lots of tech, malware fighting, IM and Windows Live related blogs. (Admittedly, I don’t read all the posts on all of these, but I do at least scan the titles and make sure I keep up with what I need to.) I also have several close friends with personal blogs - RSS helps me makes sure I never miss a post.  And of course, I have my "general interest" sites like Lifehacker and a few others. They usually have lots of daily posts and if I had to go to the sites directly to keep up, I’d never get anything else done!

All in all, I follow about 30-40 different sites at any given time.  It changes over time as I see how useful each feed turns out to be. I add, I delete - my RSS list is ever morphing (though I have a base group of sites that stay the same).  IT Guy finds visiting each site he’s interested in daily works for him. That most definitely wouldn’t work for me. I couldn’t survive without my RSS feeds. I’ve tried a few different feed aggregators and the one that works best for me is Google Reader.  I can access it from any computer and it has a very handy bookmarklet for my favorites bar, Google Reader also has email and social networking integration now, so you can post right from reader to several of the top social sites to share with your friends. They also now help you track sites that don’t have RSS feeds directly, but can monitor page changes and notify you of those. Google Reader is really evolving into a very nice, full-featured aggregator.  Oh - did I mention - it’s free?

When I’m mobile, I use an iPhone app called RSS Flash G.  RSS Flash G has a free and a paid version. I finally upgraded to the paid version on my iPhone because I found myself using it so much when I was on the go. It removes the ads and helps to support future development.  But the free version is quite good and I recommend it highly. Just like any other RSS Feed reader, you’ll likely have to try out a few of the free ones to find the features are the most intuitive for you. But there are feed readers for just about every smart phone out there, and Google Reader has a mobile site you can use for any internet equipped phone as well. (I just happen to have a personal preference for an app, it’s nothing against the mobile Google Reader site at all.)

Sure, there are lots of aggregators out there, and lots of apps for various phones. These are just the ones that work for me. Through trial and error, I just ended up with my personal favorite choices. (That’s really the best way to find anything that works for you - test it, try it out, if it doesn’t work  - move on to the next. Eventually, hopefully, you find the best solution for you.) But the real lesson here is that when you put a premium on your time, and you like to stay up on what’s going on, RSS feeds are an excellent way to do this. You can pick and choose what you want to read, when you want to read it. It’s all in one central location, easily accessible. If you haven’t started using RSS yet - give it a try and see if it doesn’t help you manage your online time just a wee bit better. 

If you’re already using RSS, drop me a note and let me know your favorite aggregator. If you’d like to learn more about Google Reader, or get more basics on how it all works you can check out the Google Reader help pages.