In an attempt to keep track of the latest news and content from numerous web resources, many users prescribe themselves to endless, daily visits to these very web resources. In today’s article, we will tell you about such a thing as RSS and how you can make your life easier with it.
What is RSS?
In many ways, all of the content on the Internet is beautifully connected and accessible to anyone. However, despite this fact, we often do that we go between a bunch of sites we need and manually check if new content has appeared on them, spending a huge amount of precious time on it. RSS can save you this problem in minutes.
Perhaps RSS is one of the most underrated tools among Internet users. Usually, you would bookmark a site in your browser so that you can quickly access the site and check the content on it later. RSS is a dynamic, live bookmark that will notify you every time there is new content on the selected resources.
Historically, it just so happened that for the delivery of content, web resources take the example of the ancient letter delivery. Site materials are packed into daily, weekly or monthly digests, which are subsequently sent to certain users via e-mail. This type of distribution may well be preferable for a certain type of content, however, if you want to receive content in its original form and share it with other users not in the form of a digest, you will need to use RSS services.
RSS allows websites to compose their content in a standardized format, often referred to as a feed (or feed). Anyone with Internet access and an appropriate feed reader can subscribe to this feed. These RSS feeds are completely free to access and many popular feed readers are also free.
How do I use RSS?
As you can see from the information above, RSS can save you tons of time. There is no need to manually check the content on the sites. However, how exactly do you use RSS? Well, let’s see. Typically, many users install feed readers as an extension to their browser, but there are also RSS readers that you can install on your system as a separate program. However, we advise you not to bother and use the extension in your browser.
It doesn’t matter which browser you use, since everything works according to approximately the same scheme: add the extension you like and add the feeds of the necessary sites to this extension. As an example, we will take a look at the installation and configuration of Smart RSS for the Opera browser. So, go to the extension store and install Smart RSS in the browser – everything is extremely simple.
As soon as the installation of the extension is completed, a distinctive orange icon will appear in the browser bar. Click on it and the following window appears in front of us:
Now we need to add some kind of rss feed. For the sake of example, we’ll use IGN’s Russia feed. We go to this site, go down to the very bottom of the page and click on the link called “RSS”, after which a link to the resource feed will appear in the address bar of the browser. Copy the link and return to Smart RSS. Click on the plus sign and enter https://ru.ign.com/feed.xml into the blank line, then click “Ok”. Immediately after that, the following appears in the Smart RSS:
The name of the IGN Russia feed appeared in the left column, in the middle column – a list of content for a certain period of time, and in the right column – a short description of the material. In order to read the full material on the resource, you need to click on the link “Full text”. Now you can safely close the Smart RSS window. As soon as there is new content in the saved feed, the RSS icon in the upper right corner turns orange.
By the same principle, we add feeds of other web resources you need. Of course, Smart RSS has settings with which you can customize the operation of this extension to suit your personal preferences, for example, change the color of the notification of new content or the appearance of the extension itself, add certain feeds to selected groups, pin especially important feeds, etc. .d. etc.
Smart RSS is one of the many RSS feed readers available on the Internet, which is just an example. You can use any other – they rarely differ much from each other. Once you’ve put a list of feeds into your RSS reader, you can forget about endlessly visiting dozens of websites. Click on the icon and check out the new content – it couldn’t be easier.