The Importance of RSS


If you haven’t realized yet, RSS is the new lifeblood of the internet, and this site has been growing. Aside from some appearance changes to the blog, I’ve added some useful new elements to the sidebar: new media-specific RSS feeds. As a content creator, these RSS feeds are vitally important the future of this site.

How to Use RSS

If you’re not already familiar, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and allows modern web browsers (such as Firefox) to alert you of new content on a website without you bothering to check the website yourself. In short, by providing RSS feeds, you can subscribe to a website. Exactly how you subscribe varies slightly from browser to browser, but usually you only need to click the little RSS icon and add it to your bookmarks. To check if new content has been added, just look at the RSS feed in your bookmarks. For instance, by using RSS one can subscribe to the Byteful Video feed and be instantly alerted when a new video is released. This saves you time, and also allows you to set up aggregators such as iTunes and Democracy player to automatically download new content. Because I have three different feeds, I’ve color coded the RSS feed links in the sidebar to make them easier to identify: Orange is the Byteful Blog Feed, Purple is the Byteful Gallery Feed, and Blue is the Byteful Video Feed.

The Byteful Gallery Feed

An RSS feed for the blog has been provided since the beginning, but the two other feeds are new. The purple feed is powered by the Byteful Gallery and provides an easy way to be notified of new content being added to the gallery, such as high resolution photography. I’m grateful that Gallery2, which is the gallery software I use, provides RSS feeds so easily. I recommend that people check Gallery2 out if they’re looking for a fantastic piece of photo gallery software and aren’t afraid to get their hands a little dirty in the linux command line. 😉

The Byteful Video Feed

The blue feed is a video feed provided by Blip.TV which, if you haven’t heard of it, is a wonderful (and free) service for creating your own video podcast. The video feed provides an easy way to be notified of new videos from Byteful Video, and if you add the RSS address to a podcast aggregator such as iTunes or Democracy player, new videos will be automatically downloaded as they are released.

Of course, this is the basis for the podcasting revolution. Indeed, the output of this video feed could be considered a video podcast show, but for now I consider it a stream of assorted video projects and not a “show” in the strictest sense — though that could change.

In short, I’ve begun to utilize RSS to it’s fullest potential — so you can, too.
Click the RSS links below and bookmark them to subscribe to everything this site has to offer.

Subscribe to blog feed + Subscribe to gallery feed + Subscribe to video feed