The Lifelong Learner :: Do what you can, with what you have, where you are -Roosevelt ::

I’ve recently come across two very cool RSS readers: Pluck and Bloglines.com. Both are free, by the way. I”ll explain how I use them and which one I like better.

What is an RSS reader? RSS is the new, cool way to distribute your blog, or your website content, i.e., news. I have several news sites that I read and several blogs, so, using an RSS reader I can do it in one place, without going through different sites. It almost feels like reading email: all of the posts that you read are marked accordingly, so you don’t have to look at it again. Plus, an RSS reader can notify you when there is a new entry in any of your subscriptions. It is a very cool technology. If you haven’t tried it, you should. It basically changed (or changes) the way I read/access news and blogs. I’ll tell you about the 2 different readers that I discovered.

Pluck This is my favorite RSS reader. It is a plug-in for IE and uses IE to render pages. That’s very cool, since you can see the actual post right inside it. It is fast, too. When you install Pluck (very easy and fast), it comes pre-installed with several categories (sports, news, business, and more) so even if you don’t have any sites (read below, though ) you can still see how the technology works.

Bloglines.com I like this one as well — I actually use both. It is very easy to use. The advantage of this one is that it sits in one central location, on their server, and you can access it from any computer. That’s a big advantage, I think, because you don’t have to install it on every computer — you can access it at work without installing anything. Bloglines has a count of users that are subscribed to the blog/site that you are retrieving info from — but I think that the count is based on the users from Bloglines.com ((

How do you get new RSS subscriptions? As more and more sites create RSS feeds, you will see a simple XML logo, RSS logo, or other on their sites. Clicking on it, copying the address, and entering that address into the reader does the job. Simple.

To get a feed from this site (yeah, from this site), click on the XML icon in the bottom left corner (last icon) and add the address to the reader. Enjoy.