Saturday’s Apple: How Do You Do Your RSS?

In an increasingly information-heavy environment online it’s easy to get overloaded with information. If you still go from site to site looking for your information fix you should get with the program and do RSS instead.

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is what made blogging and podcasting such huge hits. It’s the technology that allows us to keep up with so much information. But we still need good tools to keep up with what the RSS feeds send out to us on a regular basis and that’s where the feed reader comes in.

The feed… what? Reader?

Exactly, the feed reader. It’s basically an application (or web site), which lets you subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds and keep up with what is thrown you way in terms of news, information, gossip, well, you know, the usual more or less important and useful stuff.

There are many feed readers to chose from but I’ve been using Google Reader for a long time and I don’t plan to give it up. I suggest you take a look at it too. Not that I have any statistics on how many feeds others consume but I suspect I’m not exactly mainstream. Currently i follow 571 feeds and go through almost 30,000 posts per month. If that sounds excessive, insane perhaps, it might be. But the trick is to find a way to handle it that works for you.

To use it all you need is a GMail account. If you don’t have one, no problem, it’s free. Just head over to GMail.com and sign up for one and you’re good to go.

Then you need to find RSS feeds. That’s really a topic for another week but most web sites offer feeds today. Look for the now-standard orange icon and you’ll find RSS feeds to subscribe to. Often you can just click on the RSS icon and it’ll ask you to subscribe to the feed in Google Reader. If that doesn’t happen, copy the feed and paste it into Google Reader’s Add Subscription field.

So now you have some feeds and you’re off to keeping up with what’s happening in the world. Google Reader will show you the feeds you subscribe to over to the left. I leave mine with “Show: updated” selected, that way it only shows me the feeds with posts that are new since last time I checked in. Usually I just click on the “All items” link (which shows you how many new posts you’ve not read yet) and go through the list by using mostly the keyboard. You can also go through the list of posts with your mouse and a scroll wheel on the mouse is very helpful. Basically you see the new posts on the right in Google Reader and as you go through the posts (with keyboard or mouse) they are marked as read so they won’t show up next time.

One very nice thing about Google Reader is that you can control it almost entirely from the keyboard. This makes it much faster to work with. The keyboard shortcuts I use the most are:

• Space: scrolls one screen down and marks posts as read.
• J: Jumps to the next post and marks the previous one as read.
• K: Jumps to the previous post.
• S: Marks the post as Starred. If you mark a post as Starred it appears in your Starred items list. I use this as my bookmarks, if you like. I put a star on posts I want to follow up on, read later, or save in my (del.icio.us) bookmarks. Every few days I open up my Starred items list and process what’s in there.
• Shift-S: Marks the post as Shared. You can get an RSS feed from the items you share. This RSS feed you can give to friends so they can keep up with what you read, you can post them to a blog or to Twitter.
• E: Email the post. Some posts I feel that others should know about but sharing wouldn’t work. Then I email them instead.
• R: Refresh the Google Reader list. This is useful because sometimes it’s like it gets stuck. Hit R and it usually solves the problem.

One beautiful thing about Google Reader is that it’s always in sync between different devices. And since it’s a web application it also works on pretty much any device and platform you can imaging. I use it regularly on my iPhone, iPod touch, Nokia N810, BlackBerry, and computers. A downside might be that it’s not a desktop application, which means it misses out on some functionality. You could alleviate some of that by making a custom web browser with FluidApp or install Google Gears so you can read your feeds offline.

To finish off with I leave you with this: It’s easy to get overwhelmed with information, especially by following RSS feeds. Even though I subscribe to a ton of feeds, I’ve got into a groove of things so I manage it. It’s important that you get into a groove as well, a habit if you like. Something that works for you. Use Google Reader to manage your feeds, don’t let Google Reader manage you.