RSS feeds: survey says Yes!

First I’m a year behind with “blogs” and “blogging software,” and now this: at long last I’ve discovered the joy of RSS feeds. I have been using Blogrolling to maintain my list of blogs, and you can see I still have a gigantic list of blogs over to the right. But if you’re wondering why your blog was on there and is no longer, I’ve probably moved it to my RSS and Atom newsreader, NetNewsWire.

And if you don’t have an RSS feed on your blog. Make one. ‘Cause I’m gonna stop reading your blog, and so are a bunch of other people.

For those of you as ignorant of RSS as I was a week ago, RSS (who cares what the acronym stands for? but if you must know, it stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a way to distribute the headlines and content of…well, just about anything. Blogs, news sites, updates to the Wikipedia.

I was refreshing my Blogroll 20 times a day, to see if the little “updated” icon showed up next to a blog. And sometimes I’d already seen the post, but the updated icon stayed there for the requisite number of hours, during which time the blog might have updated again. Then for a couple of weeks (it seemed), Blogrolling was down, so there were a whole bunch of blogs I never visited, not realizing they had been updated. And I kept visiting other blogs over and over again, hoping to see if they’d been updated.

I don’t need to do this any more. Now I click the “Refresh All” button in NetNewsWire and it shows me the headlines of new articles in my favorite blogs. And if the blog is syndicating using RSS 2.0, I get the whole entry. If it’s using RSS 1.0, I get the first paragraph or so, at which point I click the link and new tab with the blog opens up.

I’m slowly trying to delete the blogs I have a feed for off my Blogroll. I’m frustrated by how many blogs don’t use RSS: if your host doesn’t provide RSS/Atom support, I think you can sign up with Feedburner to make a feed. And if you don’t have any good RSS reading software, like NetNewsWire or Safari, you can use Bloglines.

I guess the downside of all this is that now there’s instant notification of new posts, which means my desire for even more new stuff grows. But it’s way cool and I’ll be very annoyed with you if you don’t syndicate.

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I told Darin I was using NetNewsWire instead of Safari to read blogs using RSS. He sighed and said, “Well, at least they’re using WebKit.” (A project Darin also works on.)

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Update: Apparently my RSS feed looks wonky. Waaah. And how come certain headlines keep showing up as new, even after I’ve read them? Do they show up as new if they get edited or something? (Corrente is an especial offender: its headlines are always renewing themselves.)

And I was going to attempt to explain the differences between RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom — but why should I, when there are better-informed people out there to do it for me?