Understanding this RSS Thing

This is a continuation of our Understanding this RSS Thing article.

Opera 9+

If there ever was a unique browser, Opera is it. It’s an excellent piece of software, though. It, too, blows away Internet Explorer in both function and performance. It also has a superior Zoom feature compared to IE. As much as we love Firefox, Opera’s RSS management is arguably better. To subscribe to a feed with Opera, do the following (to best of the lot we think):

Like the others, click on the orange address bar RSS icon or the link provided (on the sidebar on this site).
A popup will come up asking: “Would you like to subscribe to [Feed name]? The news feed will be added to the Feeds menu and automatically checked for updates.”
Click Yes.

Easy right? So is using it. It works like this:

When you click Yes as noted above, you’ll be brought to the horizontally split page. The feed titles will be at the top, as links, with a content area below.
Click on the title of choice to see the feed in the lower pane. You will be shown the excerpt (or full article if applicable) and image if provided.
You will also be given a full link to the article if you wish to visit the site or read more than the excerpt provides.

There are also other browsers that handle RSS, namely, Safari, Flock, and others. All work similarly to those mentioned above. Let’s not stop here, there are more options, namely browser-independent feed management services and stand-alone dedicated feed management software:

Feed Readers

Admittedly, we don’t use feed reader software. As such we can’t give you a lot of information about what’s best or how to use it. Maybe this article’s resources list can help. We can, however, offer you a list of various software from which you can learn more.

We do not endorse any of the software above. It is listed in alphabetical order. Please read the maker’s information carefully to check for cost, compatibility, function, and performance. Use at your own risk. This is good advice for the aggregation services as well, listed next.

Feed Services

As is the case above, we don’t use feed aggregation services so we can’t give you a lot of concrete information. We can, however, offer you a list of such services with which you can investigate further.

There other services out there, this is just sampling. And this about sums up this article, with exception to a brief discussion about extra features as well as link to more resources.

Extra Features

Once you get the hang of the basics you’ll be glad you did this. It is a huge time saver. With the browsers — or with the software and services — this is a great way for us to stay up-to-date about what’s being published on the sites we like.

You’ll find some sites have extra features. Instead of a single feed, for example, they will offer an entire page of feeds for different departments and what not. You will also find features such as “Subscribe to comments” on blogs, or web logs, offering dedicated feeds to the users comments on various posts. This is handy if, for instance, you commented, asking a question, and are awaiting an answer. A Subscribe to comments feed can help you accomplish this.

Exploring RSS will reward you. To help you get started, if this resource isn’t enough, here are more worth looking at:

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