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New: RSS feed! Get Tysto sent to your RSS reader :-|

2006.04.13 — Business | Tysto | Technology | Internet | Satire | by Tysto

RSS feed

Click to see the crappy XML code, then paste the URL into your RSS reader's "subscribe" function. Or don't. Whatever.

We've added an RSS Web feed to Tysto, so now you can have our headlines and intro paragraphs from the front page delivered directly to your RSS reader. Why would you want to do this? We don't know, but it seems to be very popular, so we hopped on the bandwagon. Never say Tysto is behind the times and old-fashioned. We don't powder our wigs around here, you know. We swapped ruffles for tab collars long ago. We button our knickerbockers below the knee.

RSS, for those who still parade around in tri-corn hats with buckles on their shoes, stands for "really simple syndication," a really complicated method of allowing users to aggregate their own news and infotainment in a special reader application similar to an e-mail client but more annoying to use. Here at Tysto international headquarters, we use RssReader exclusively, because it's free and it was the first search result that came up in Google.

RSS uses XML (extensible markup language) instead of HTML (horribly twisted markup language), and there are about ten different versions, some of which are not compatible because they were invented by competing bands of "open source" hippies.

In most cases, you click "Add New Feed" or "Subscribe" or something similar and paste in the URL of the feed you want to subscribe to. You get that URL by clicking on the orange RSS button you find on various Web sites, like the one on this page and in the navigation panel on the left. Or maybe it's a blue RSS button. Or an orange XML button. Or a button that says "Add this feed to Yahoogle!" if you are the sort of person who uses the Yahoogle news aggregation service. Whatever. Damned hippies.

Anyway, the result is supposed to be that the latest headlines and blurbs from the feed are automatically fetched periodically. Then you can read those blurbs and decide if you want to read the whole item, in which case you click on the link to open the page in a browser window. Sweet. You have saved yourself the trouble of clicking on a bookmark-slash-favorite and bringing up the page separately. This is very useful if you have a large number of sites that you visit that have lots of crap content and one story once in a while that you are interested in. Otherwise you might as well just visit the site regularly the usual way. Actually, you might as well do that anyway. Whatever. Don't let me tell you how to live your life.

Don't confuse RSS with podcasting, which involves summoning demons with magical pea pods. Podcasting is cool. What may be surprising is that many "podcatchers" like iTunes and Juice can't read text-only feeds.

You may ask why e-mail clients don't read RSS feeds. Go ahead. Ask. I'll wait.

Again, the stoner hippies who designed RSS don't have any influence over Microsoft and others who make e-mail software, so those companies have been slow to adapt and crush them. Don't worry. Soon, e-mail software will accommodate RSS and podcasting, and all the free RSS readers and podcatchers will be redundant. Whatever.

 

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