The RSS Infestation

I was never a huge fan of RSS early on, readers were clunky, it didn't really suit my workstyle, etc. However as with some innovations in the IT world, this one matured, evolved, and became a pretty slick solution. We had a simple RSS feed for headlines in the last version of our site, but it was a simple file that was recreated everyday and stored on the server.

Now we have added RSS feeds for most everything on the site. If you look around the site, you'll see an two RSS images (shown below), that indicates where we have feeds.

Now it's not everywhere, but there are a number of key areas that we think you'll find valuable. If you want to see it in other places, let us know.

Articles - Content is the big draw here at SQLServerCentral.com and we've set up feeds for particular tags. If you select any tag, say SQL Server 2005, you'll find the RSS image at the top (shown below)

If you click this link you'll get the RSS feed for this tag. Or you can add this to your favorite reader and get the articles as they appear.

Editorials - I feel weird writing this, but I know they're popular and I appreciate all the comments I get on them. So there's a tag for editorials and you get add that to your reader as well. The RSS feed is here.

Forums - There are email notifications for forum posts, and you are welcome to keep using them, but for someone that hits 10-20 threads a day, I don't really want a Q of emails stacking up. So we have RSS feeds in the forums. You can subscribe to an entire forum, like the Employees and Employers forum, or a specific thread, like the Weirdest Interview Question thread, which is pretty interesting.

What is RSS Anyway?

Since there are some of you that aren't familiar, I'll give you a quick lesson.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it's basically an XML document specification. It's designed to allow you to "publish" information as a feed, which is really just a list of your various articles. The articles could be text, audio, video, pod casts, family videos, or whatever else you can put up as a URL on the World Wide Web. Atom is another type of feed, so you'll often see a link on a page, like a blog list, that says "Atom" along with "RSS". It works the same, it's just a different format.

You add these RSS links, or feeds, into some sort of client that aggregates them together and allows you to see what's new in the feed. There are quite a few readers out there, such as FeedDemon, Newgator, and more. Since I hate software, personally I use Google Reader as a tool to monitor a couple hundred feeds and get links for Database Weekly.

Whichever client you choose, it's easy to add a feed to your list. Just click one of the RSS images, and when it opens in your browser, copy the URL from the toolbar. Then go to your client and paste it in. As an example, the feed for Editorials is:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Xml/Rss/Articles/Editorial/

I clicked on the RSS icon on the Editorials Page/. If you click the Editorial feed above, you'll see the document in your browser.

If I copy that link, I'd then go to the Google Reader, click "Add a Subscription", and paste in the URL as shown below.

That's it and the editorials would then appear in my Google Reader. As new ones appeared, they'd populate in there and once I'd marked something as read, it would disappear. I tend to configure my reader to hide things I've read, but you can choose to do that (or not) for your own client.

I urge you to give RSS a try if you watch forums now or subscribe to changes in threads. You might find that RSS provides a more friendly and efficient way to process the information.