Jeremiah Tolbert

Today is RSS Awareness Day. I usu­ally don’t put much stock in these arbi­trary aware­ness days, but RSS has changed the way I think about infor­ma­tion fun­da­men­tally, so I thought I’d talk a lit­tle bit about that today, with a focus on how zines have adopted the tech­nol­ogy, or not.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In prac­tice, RSS involves a feed and a feed reader. Think of these com­po­nents as like a web­page, and a browser (except that feed read­ers can work in browsers, and feeds syn­di­cate the con­tent of web­sites, but let’s not go there just yet). The feed reader parses the con­tent of RSS feeds and presents them in a for­mat that you and I can read. The RSS feed is gen­er­ally made up of a form of XML, and is a sin­gle file con­tain­ing all the recent updates to a web­site, gen­er­ally the blog stuff. RSS feeds are the under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy in pod­cast­ing as well.

In sim­ple terms, RSS feeds allow you to aggre­gate con­tent from a bunch of dif­fer­ent web­sites, keep­ing track of new con­tent, with­out hav­ing to visit the web­sites them­selves. There is more that can and will be done with the tech, but right now, this is the pri­mary use.

Why I Love RSS

I have a men­tal ill­ness that man­i­fests itself in an intense fear that some­where, some­thing is hap­pen­ing on the inter­net that is cool, and I am not read­ing about it. My RSS reader is my med­ica­tion, and I take an hourly dose. If not more.

Prior to using feed read­ers, I had a blog roll, and I would man­u­ally click through the links, check­ing each web­site one after another. I’d get to the end of the list and start over again. Ostensibly, my feed reader (Google Reader being my drug of choice) saves me time by col­lect­ing new entries from all these sites, sort­ing them, and allow­ing me to treat them more like email than web­sites. Each post comes in as a sep­a­rate item, and I mark them as read or unread, and can sort them into dif­fer­ent fold­ers for organizing.

Up until a few months ago, I was sub­scribed to nearly 300 feeds on sub­jects rang­ing from biol­ogy to web design. I real­ized that all this infor­ma­tion was over­whelm­ing me, so I stepped it down to half of that. Most of what I removed were sci­ence fic­tion related feeds. I real­ized, at a cer­tain point, that not every­one in the field had some­thing to say about the genre that I was inter­ested in.

Despite the abil­ity to become over­whelmed, I still love RSS because it does pro­vide effi­ciency in some­thing I would be doing anyway–trying to keep track of a mil­lion things. It brings me con­stant sources of new infor­ma­tion, and on a good, day I learn a dozen new things that prove use­ful in the long run. Many of the links that I blog (and that blog­ging fea­ture is cur­rently not work­ing and I do not know why. Paul Raven, could you shoot me an email with your deli­cious set­tings? Somehow, I’ve got mine wrong) come from my feeds.

Speculative Fiction and RSS

One of the last things I did before clos­ing up shop at the Fortean Bureau was to move the site to a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem and pro­vide an RSS feed. I don’t know if I was the first to do this–probably not–but there’s still spo­radic adop­tion espe­cially among the ‘zines.

Online Zines I read with RSS Feeds

• Fantasy Magazine
• Clarkesworld
• Escape Pod (well, not ‘read’, but ‘listen’)
• PodCastle (same as above)
• Lone Star Stories (Somebody lis­tened to me! Insanity!)

Magazines I read that DO NOT have RSS Feeds that I can find

• Strange Horizons
  • Note: SH does have a feed for the reviews. (Thanks Niall!)
• Lone Star Stories
• Subterranean Press (has RSS feed, but not just for the fiction)
• Chizine

My point being, if you are an online mag­a­zine pub­lisher in this day and age, you need to adopt RSS as a mar­ket­ing tool if for no other rea­son. RSS reminds me to check these sites. The ones with­out, I am more likely to for­get about, unless, iron­i­cally, some­one else in my feeds men­tions the new con­tent. You don’t even have to syn­di­cate the full text of the short sto­ries for me. Just a title and author (please, please include author in your feed infor­ma­tion. Fantasy doesn’t do this, and I think it’s prob­lem­atic. It looks like the author of every story is “Sean”) is suf­fi­cient to func­tion as a reminder. It’s like a newslet­ter noti­fi­ca­tion, only less obnox­ious (why, I am not sure. I guess because you only ever get RSS from what you set up for, so there’s no such thing as RSS spam).

If you have a blog, you have a feed

As to the rest of us, if you’re using any of the com­mon blog­ging ser­vices, you’re almost cer­tainly serv­ing up a feed some­where. Ask your­self if your design dis­plays the RSS feed promi­nently enough that inter­ested par­ties can sub­scribe. Those of us who use Firefox have it easy. Firefox auto­mat­i­cally detects whether a site has a feed and dis­plays an orange icon in the address bar of the browser, but only if the RSS feed is prop­erly indi­cated in the header of the html doc­u­ment. Some sites have feeds, but fail to put that link in the header tem­plate, so we have to hunt the page for the link. You lose poten­tial read­ers the longer they go with­out find­ing it. And yes, I know that my new design doesn’t have an RSS Link fea­tured promi­nently. I’m ter­ri­ble at tak­ing my own advice, but I am going to offer a very detailed RSS side­bar in the future, allow­ing peo­ple to sub­scribe to par­tic­u­lar types of infor­ma­tion that I write about seper­ately. It’s com­ing soon.

RSS: It’s not just for posts anymore

RSS feeds have gained some inter­est­ing new tools and uses recently. Yahoo Pipes allows any­one to mash up var­i­ous RSS feeds and cre­ate new types of con­tent. Blog man­age­ment sys­tems like WordPress now offer RSS feeds for indi­vid­ual posts, so that you can fol­low the com­ment dis­cus­sions. RSS use is grow­ing. It could stand to be a bit eas­ier, as mash​able​.com wrote recently, but it’s a tech­nol­ogy that is going to stay around for the forsee­able future. It really does save time. If you’re not already using a Reader, I highly sug­gest you con­sider one. And if you’re not pro­vid­ing an RSS feed of your con­tent, you’re miss­ing out on readers.

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Tags: Aggregator, Feed Readers, magazines, RSS, SF, Syndication and Feed