TAA Canada

As you browse the web you’ve probably seen buttons like these:

To find out what they are and how to use them read on. [If you cannot see the rest of this article, click on the title... ]

Technorati Tags: aggregator, syndication, RSS

Those buttons will all do the same thing, they link you to a boring page of text that is to be read by a program called an aggregator. So, to use these buttons, you will need an aggregator. You can download free aggregators for your computer by searching on the web. There are also web sites that will act as your aggregator.

The buttons take you to the RSS syndication feed for this site. It is not really for human eyes.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Sites like this blog, all online newspaper sections, and most Internet pages that are updated with some regularity automatically update the information on that boring page of text every time something new appears at the site. These feeds are all around you, so there must be some people who like to use this service. Try it, it, you might find it useful.

(BTW, if you don’t want to be bothered with RSS, you may subscribe to this site with plain old email. Click Request email Subscription in the sidebar under About this site. Or don’t subscribe, but please visit this page frequently.)

If you have an aggregator, click on one of those buttons (above) and copy that URL. Click the subscribe button on your aggregator (or whatever command is expected) and the program will do the rest. It will figure out the name of the blog, TAA Canada, and display it in your list of feeds. If you click on that name in your aggregator, in another pane you will see list of the titles of our recent posts. If you click on any of those you will see a synopsis of that post. Click on that and it will open your browser to that page in the blog.

Your aggregator regularly and swiftly checks all of the sites of interest to you and shows you at a glance what is new.

Is this good? For me, I seldom listen to or watch broadcast news — and I usually know about breaking stories hours or days before the public. Although I merely glance at the popular news on my aggregator, I am always up-to-date with the subjects of particular interest to me. That includes blogs such as this one. Currently I am monitoring 46 RSS feeds… and I see that at the moment those feeds have a total of 522 stories. Just the news, no ads. You will have to try it to see how simple and easy this is. And fun.