RSS comes to you

Just writing this post on a techie high. Those of you who are already conversant with Feeds/Atom/RSS (not the BJP one) please don't read any further and save me embarrassment. Just like when you are telling a joke and you ask the people who guess it to shut their mouths. You can also count me technically challenged and of course ignorant if I you think I should not be getting a eureka feeling on using feeds.

So this idea came from my friend in chennai who wanted a method so that he could see if a new post has arrived on my blog. You read mine and I read yours (Aur kya blogs become famous like this only). Of course there are other ways to popularize your blogs too. Go put crap against any sane argument and you'd attract venom from all and sundry and then accidentally many will stick on to your posts. Well I am digressing from this tech topic. So I had heard about atom/RSS but never had the time to change my happy ways of surfing the net. Every damn site said it provided RSS feeds too in an advertising way and I never cared. Just out of curiosity had clicked on anshul's blog and found it broken and so did not do much about it.

So on friend's request just tried to read about feeds link from google news page. Then looked around on the firefox extensions and got this cool extension to it - Wizz RSS. I also tried Sage, but its too minimalistic or too techie for me to discover its all features. Shall tell its good points later. Now both of them install in seconds and give you a nice sidebar (In case of Wizz avoid saying "import public lists", it would just clutter your category list). Now you can read endlessly on wizz help and see how to use it, but since I have tried it I would just give you 3 steps to get its best working for you. Rest I leave to you people.

Side bar has three sections Top- Category and channel list, Middle gives you the list of topics, and bottom gives you an abstract or preview of the article.

So
Step1: Right click on the category pane and say "Add Category" and it shall add folders. So for e.g. I say a category "blog"

Step 2: On your address bar type your truly's blog address (http://apurvashukla.blogspot.com) and when it loads you can click on the search button on the top of the category window. it looks something like this . It shall present with a pop up and detect the atom feed of the blogger. Just drag that and put it on the folder "blog" created in the category pane. Viola you just started a spark.

Step3: The most interesting step is to get updates automatically. For that right click on the "Brain Sparks" link and say add to watch list. Now go to the Wizz Toolbar and there in the drop down of "Watch List", choose "Configure watchlist". Options there are intuitive. And then you shall be having a popup once it finds any updates on the list of blogs you specified. Don't forget to check "Automatically start watchlist".

What I was telling about Sage was that its a simplistic reader and gives you a nice rendering of the feeds it gets in a web page form but I could not find the pop up feature in it. Maybe its there but after finding Wizz, I don't have the patience to dig deep into it. Interestingly feed rendering is very customizable and cool but I think they need to work on a full package a bit.

To be the same you were, I mean if you don't like the sidebar and the toolbar. I would say after you are done with all your customizations just hide the side bar (alt+s) and the toolbar from the "view" menu. In case a new post comes the pop is anyhow going to tell you.

Now why I feel this is a good thing is that I don't need to keep any of these sites open to see if they are updated. Just subscribe to their feeds. Wizz will keep polling these sites for me and tell me if there is any update. I think this way I would be able to read a dozen more blogs in the same time. Also and it comes just as the ease of mails.

And arre haan.. gmail also gives you RSS feeds, got to check out.. haven't tried that.