Teaching Dad about RSS
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a *huge* believer in RSS. I’ve been using it with various business and personal projects for years. It’s how I get my news. It rocks … for me. However, the mainstream has *not* caught on yet, as is evidenced by my Dad’s most recent e-mail to me about this very blog:
Do you send out an e-mail when things change on the blog, or is it up to people to just check back periodically?
So how do I (quickly, and in a way that won’t frustrate anyone) teach people like my Dad about RSS? Now, it should be said that Dad is an engineer and a nerd in his own right, but not necessarily up on the latest bleeding edge technology (yes, I know RSS has existed for years, but let’s be realistic: it’s still bleeding edge). He’s on a Windows machine, so there’s no recommending Tiger’s Safari with RSS. I guess I could (and probably should) show him Firefox, but maybe there’s something better. Anyone?
May 28th, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Set him up with a web-based aggregator like Bloglines. It’s the easiest, and least painful way, to introduce RSS to the ‘rents.
May 28th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
Set him up with a web-based aggregator like Bloglines. It’s the easiest, and least painful way, to introduce RSS to the ‘rents.
May 28th, 2005 at 9:56 pm
I’m with David. You can shoot him over the article I wrote for TMO covering Bloglines and how to get started with it. Bloglines is great because it comes with “starter” feeds, as well as making it pretty user-friendly to get started. There’s also the fantastic Tim Yang authored piece on 15 things you can do with RSS>
Firefox has great RSS support (more like live bookmarks than anything) and in my article I briefly go into how to integrate FF with Bloglines.
In a nutshell, I’d avoid giving him a stand-alone application for RSS feeds. It makes it seem much more cumbersome. “Oh, I need a whole application to do it for me?” instead of “Oh I just go to this website!”
Easy peasy, Japanesey.
May 29th, 2005 at 1:56 am
I’m with David. You can shoot him over the article I wrote for TMO covering Bloglines and how to get started with it. Bloglines is great because it comes with “starter” feeds, as well as making it pretty user-friendly to get started. There’s also the fantastic Tim Yang authored piece on 15 things you can do with RSS>
Firefox has great RSS support (more like live bookmarks than anything) and in my article I briefly go into how to integrate FF with Bloglines.
In a nutshell, I’d avoid giving him a stand-alone application for RSS feeds. It makes it seem much more cumbersome. “Oh, I need a whole application to do it for me?” instead of “Oh I just go to this website!”
Easy peasy, Japanesey.