rss feeds and aggregators

I’m discovering the joys of RSS. For the uninitiated:

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it’s not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the “recent changes” page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

Thus, I can read all of the sites that update regularly from one simple interface. It’s simpler than the browser, because my RSS Aggregator (aKregator is part of the KDE environment) collects recent entries from all the disparate sites I would normally go to, and puts them all in one place like an email program would.

This program docks into the KDE panel, and a small number appears on the icon when I have unread items. Very cool.

This site has an RSS feed (technically it’s an atom feed) available. And I’ve already imported many of my friends blogs.

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