Articles
RSS & Mac OS X for beginners, using NetNewsWire
Friday 31 August 2007
So, you read the first part of this series and are now excited about the possibility of subscribing to feeds for sites you like. I now propose to give some step-by-step instructions for how to do that, whether you use Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer on Mac OS X or Windows. This article concentrates on the Mac, specifically how to set up and use my free feed reader of choice, NetNewsWire from Newsgator.
The principles of subscribing to a feed
When you want to subscribe to a site, there are three steps you have to take. Keep these in mind and you've won half the battle:
- Find out if the site / section you're interested in has a feed of some kind;
- Find out the address of that feed;
- Give that address to your feed reader to add it to your subscriptions list.
So, you want to start using RSS
Wednesday 11 July 2007
If you’ve been using the Web at all during the last eighteen months or so, you will almost certainly have seen the proliferation of advertisements of ‘RSS’ or ‘feeds’. Although many people have attempted to explain what these things actually are and why they’re useful,1 I’m sorry to say that for the moment this feed thing has mostly remained the preserve of the geek. I’ve tried to encourage people to find out why RSS would be a good thing for them to use, but they’ve mostly glazed over as I begin to explain the whole thing.
So, I thought it might be helpful briefly to sum up in this article why RSS and feeds are useful, and then (in the second article in this series, soon forthcoming) to give some—I hope—clear instructions for you to play along at home,
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