RSS Reader Blam!

I regularly read various news websites and weblogs about stuff I deal with at work. It can take a fair amount of time and I regularly take about half my lunchtime keeping up with this stuff. When you work in the IT industry you are forced to stay current, and reading websites is a big part of that.

Most sites nowdays that offer periodically updated content like news sites and weblogs have something called a feed. The feed is just a specially reformatted version of the main page of the site usually, that can be easily read by other programs. These feeds are used by news aggregation sites to consolidate articles from multiple other sites, and they are also used with tools called RSS Readers that allow users to collect articles from many various websites and read them quickly without having to use a browser and navigate all over the web.

I’ve started today by setting up an RSS Reader called Immendio Blam!, into which I’ve added all my frequently used sites’s feeds. I’ll try using that interface to do my technical reading and see how it goes. Incidentally, you can subscribe to my weblog’s feeds by clicking one of the syndication links on the right side of the main page. The site is syndicated in RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 so take your pick. I am going to try to push for the company to integrate RSS feeds into the office main pages when we do our Intranet redesign, so that local office news can be aggregated on a central site, and users can subscribe to feeds they are interested in.