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RSS can get your news delivered and organised
List of RSS feed we provide Breaking news http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/breakingnews.xml Top stories http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/topstories.xml News channel articles http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/news.xml Business channel articles http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/business.xml Opinion channel articles http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/opinion.xml Feature channel articles http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/feature.xml Travel channel articles http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/travel.xml Food channel articles http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/leisure.xml Arts & Culture channel articles http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/entertainment.xml Auto channel articles http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/auto.xml Lifestyle channel articles http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/life.xml Tech channel articles http://www.bangkokpost.com/rss/data/tect.xml You may recently have heard or seen of something called RSS, or noticed little orange buttons around the websites that mention RSS, syndication, Atom feeds and the like. Since BangkokPost.com has recently begun adding RSS feeds to their service, here is some background, and ideas on how to make it work for you.
RSS is a "feed" or a broadcast sent to you, and routed to your RSS"reader," the software or website you use to browse the news, views, reviews and opinions you choose to have sent to you.
This is not email; you must choose the sites you want to read and physically subscribe to. It is not spam; you can unsubscribe or end the feed at single mouse click.
But it also isn't browsing. Web pages come to you, instead of you going to them. They arrive in summary form, and you look at them when it pleases you - instantly, or an hour or a few days later.
Here is the example:
You go to BangkokPost.com (who doesn't?). At the top right hand corner of the front page is the website's Breaking News, where the Bangkok Post Digital staff put the early news, before the newspaper can print it and deliver it to your door.
At the very bottom, right-hand corner of this tasteful Breaking News box is a small, orange button that says "RSS". Once you install an RSS reader of some sort on your computer, you may be able to click that button and subscribe. Most likely, however, you must do this:
Right click the RSS button. Scroll down and click Copy Shortcut. Go to your RSS software (please be patient, it won't be long) and find where you Open or Add an RSS feed.
Once you do that, you no longer have to visit BangkokPost.com to check on Breaking News. It arrives regularly - how regularly is up to you. Your RSS reader will have all the headlines and the first paragraphs of each story. If you want more, just click, and the full story opens up, from the website, just as if you had gone there yourself.
BangkokPost.com also offers the Top Stories of the day - the most important headlines - as an RSS feed, and these also will be updated and shown to you automatically.
The reason for RSS is simple: It's win-win. You get brief summaries of all websites and stories you want without waiting minutes or hours for those websites to load - only to learn there's nothing interesting there. The websites get more visits from you (through the RSS software) because you have more time to click only on what is interesting, rather than wandering the web more aimlessly.
Put another way, BangkokPost.com has 20 to 30 Breaking News stories daily, but only shows 10 at a time on the web page. With RSS, you have them all.
You can get RSS on the web. The site du jour is Bloglines.com, a well-organised site. Here, you log onto one website, and all the other websites you like come to you - blogs, news, technology developments, movie reviews - whatever you like.
I like this to happen on my own computer on my own desktop, so that I have the links and stories available even if the Internet isn't working. I had almost settled on a reader when a strange thing happened: Its website disappeared.
SharpReader is an older program (as RSS goes), and does everything I want. Subscriptions are so easy to be almost automatic, and updates are shown as they arrive, for three seconds in a pop-up box on my screen, alerting me to new news without getting in my face.
Snarfer, a fairly new RSS reader, reads Thai very well, as well as English, and lets you subscribe even to web chats. You generally subscribe to RSS feeds by clicking or copying orange-coloured buttons like the one that has been enlarged for this example. Just as I started to write this review, the website ownership expired - I suppose; hijacking is not unknown on the web - and then suddenly appeared again the day this column went to pre-press.
If you want quite an excellent, small and terrifically fast reader, you'll give this fairly small (800KB full download) SharpReader a test.
By the way, SharpReader and many of the newer RSS readers require Microsoft .Net Framework, which has three versions. If you have an older or non-updated Windows, you may have to get this entirely free but huge software set from Microsoft here: tinyurl.com/kcvy
Snarfer is the program I finally settled on. It's one of the newest, one of the smallest and suits my needs very well because it's fast.
Geeks who really like to play with options may find Snarfer a little restrictive. If you want your unread headlines from East Asia to be yellow on purple, while those from Europe should be blue on red, you have the wrong program.
Snarfer is well named (snarf: to nick, swipe, abstract) and well suited to quick, structured presentation of headlines and summaries of news, views and reviews. I can't see how adding (or dropping) an RSS feed could be easier. Even better, Snarfer can import and export lists of feeds, including to RSS-reader websites such as Bloglines.
SharpReader is at www.sharpreader.net
See Snarfer run at www.snarfware.com
Email: wandas@post.com
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