Why bother with news readers?
In my previous post I suggested that you can download a news reader and have the blogs come to you rather than you going to the blogs. Well, for the Mac there's NetNewsWire and for Windows there's Abilon.
I'm not sure what the Windows one is like but judging from the website it seemed ok. There's squillions of news readers out there so if you can find a better one perhaps you could post a comment here. But Abilon looked ok.
So, why download these programs? The sheer convenience of it is probably the largest factor here. Imagine being delivered a newspaper each day with content customised to what you're interested in. This is what a news reader does. It fetches the information off a web site called a "source" and puts the information into the program, organised into a series of headings per source. For example, if you go to BBC's website daily to read up on the news, instead of going to the website and waiting for it to load and then clicking the headlines you'd like to read about, using a news reader you can add a new source using the news reader and it will provide you with the news headlines and a brief (or full) description of the news item.
A lot of websites are starting to add a little orange button on the page which has written on it "RSS", "Atom" or "XML". If you right click the orange button and choose "Copy Link" (or whatever it is)
and paste it into your news reader, the news reader will fetch the headlines from that website automatically without having to waste your time. Cool huh?
I'd imagine there's a more in-depth tutorial in the program that you download so if all this makes no sense it will when you read that.
But news readers are highly recommended. Any thoughts?
I'm not sure what the Windows one is like but judging from the website it seemed ok. There's squillions of news readers out there so if you can find a better one perhaps you could post a comment here. But Abilon looked ok.
So, why download these programs? The sheer convenience of it is probably the largest factor here. Imagine being delivered a newspaper each day with content customised to what you're interested in. This is what a news reader does. It fetches the information off a web site called a "source" and puts the information into the program, organised into a series of headings per source. For example, if you go to BBC's website daily to read up on the news, instead of going to the website and waiting for it to load and then clicking the headlines you'd like to read about, using a news reader you can add a new source using the news reader and it will provide you with the news headlines and a brief (or full) description of the news item.
A lot of websites are starting to add a little orange button on the page which has written on it "RSS", "Atom" or "XML". If you right click the orange button and choose "Copy Link" (or whatever it is)
and paste it into your news reader, the news reader will fetch the headlines from that website automatically without having to waste your time. Cool huh?
I'd imagine there's a more in-depth tutorial in the program that you download so if all this makes no sense it will when you read that.
But news readers are highly recommended. Any thoughts?
posted by Kiel at 10:29 pm
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