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What’s RSS all about?

Posted in Tools

This article is now very out of date. I have since written a more up to date account of how I use RSS.

So what’s all this talk about RSS, feeds, subscribing, etc.?

It’s something I couldn’t do without for my daily news fix. All I’ve got to do, once I’ve subscribed to a feed, is sit back and let my email program grab any new posts that have been published.

Every time something comes through I see a little number appear and I can read the headline and a line or two of text and decide whether I’m interested enough to read on. If I am, I can follow a link to the article on that person or organisation’s website.

I’ve got my feeds divided into folders- News, Football (all the team news I’m interested in), Music (news of up-coming gigs, new songs, etc.), Web (all of the web-related sites whose opinions I enjoy), Humour (satirical cartoon websites and so on), you get the idea!

If I decide I don’t want to subscribe anymore, I just delete the feed and no more is heard. No emails to sent, requesting that I’m removed from the mailing list and no annoying ‘unsubscribe’ buttons and explanations as to why I’m leaving. (That said, email newsletters have their place.)

So, the next time you’re on, for example, the BBC’s website looking at the recipes section or your favourite football team’s section, look for the little RSS button and give it a click!

This next bit’s for Chrome users

This button might not work if you use Google Chrome. For some reason they haven’t got round to supporting RSS as one of the defaults of the browser! Instead you have to download an extension and install it within Chrome. All seems a bit user-unfriendly (and not at all like Google!) to me, but here’s how to do it.

Accessibility in your inbox

I send an accessibility-centric newsletter on the last day of every month, containing:

  • A roundup of the articles I’ve posted
  • A hot pick from my archives
  • Some interesting posts from around the web

I don’t collect any data on when, where or if people open the emails I send them. Your email will only be used to send you newsletters and will never be passed on. You can unsubscribe at any time.

More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

  1. Getting started with NVDA

    Everyone who works in digital product development should be familiar with screen reader software. Here’s how to get started with NVDA on Windows.

  2. An enhancement to accessible responsive tables

    I’ve written about accessible responsive tables before but something has been bugging me. So here’s another step to make those tables even better.