Organizing Your RSS Subscriptions with Google Reader
What is a RSS?
RSS syndication is one of the many ways websites get in touch with their visitors outside their pages. With RSS, visitors are notified of the site’s most recent content updates and additions. It is then safe to say that a site’s RSS is a condensed copy of the site’s significant contents. Typically, sites with article dominated contents such as news and blog sites offer RSS subscription to their visitors and members in the form of XML. In addition, webmasters can choose to syndicate other contents such as new products, promos, user profiles, site logs and just about any content worth publishing. People who subscribe to RSS feeds are then free to use their preferred RSS reader to convert RSS feed XML into human-readable form.
There are lots of RSS readers available. Such ranges from desktop-based to online readers. Some even offer voice-narrated RSS feeders famous among users with reading disability.
Enter Google Reader
Google Reader is an online RSS feed reader that lets users organize their RSS subscriptions into one complete RSS management console. It scans your RSS subscriptions for updates and automatically updates your RSS list with a fresh copy. You can add RSS subscriptions to your list, remove an item, group RSS feeds into groups, move feeds from one group into another, etc. Etc.
But these are just features of a typical RSS feed reader. What, then, makes Google reader unique from other RSS readers?
Exclusive Features of Google Reader
Aside from letting users organize their own RSS subscriptions list, Google Reader has lots of exceptional distinctive features. Feed Discovery lets you add new subscriptions by selecting from Google’s pre-packaged bundles composed of groups of similar RSS contents, by searching sites with RSS feeds using a search term, or adding your friends’ Blogger, del.Icio.Us, Flickr, MySpace or Xanga syndicated pages easily.
Another feature worth mentioning is Google Reader’s the ability to share your favorite RSS contents to other people. How? You can choose to make your chosen feeds be seen by everyone (public), email the link to your friends or even incorporate the RSS feed’s content to your own site.
Lastly and most importantly, like most Google gadgets around, Google reader is free and available to all registered Google users.
Downsides of Google Reader
Luckily for their competitors, Google Reader has some bugs of its own. Recently, it has been showing duplicate entries from the same RSS feeds. This may be happening when the site hosting the RSS feed changes the location of the entry being pointed to by the feeds, thus resulting to the same entry with different location.
Though incorporating choice RSS feeds into one’s own website may look like a lazy webmaster’s friend, sad to say, it is not. Codes Google provide to do this comes in javascript format which means instant content for your site but totally useless to search engines.
Until next time.
This entry was submitted by Jake goulding. Jake is also one of the three orginal writer on Bored Tonight! And has written lots of different articles to do with oak doors.