It's a nice Friday morning. I'm in a good mood. Feeling generous. I am going to share one of my power user secrets.

You may have asked yourself "How does Brad stay so incredibly well informed and up-to-date on just about everything?" One of the secrets, besides my incredibly big brain, is SharpReader and RSS feeds.

An RSS feed is a page that is regularly updated, maybe every 30 seconds, maybe every 5 minutes, by a website and is meant to be read by RSS aggregators. The RSS feed is just a listing of all the stories that a site publishes. The aggregator program can sort this feed by date, title, etc.

This is what the raw CNN technology feed looks like. Not too useful like that, but install SharpReader on your PC and it will look like this:



I have about 20 feeds entered into SharpReader at work. Rather than visiting each of the 20 sites several times a day to stay current on things, I just look at SharpReader, which I leave running all day, and I can scan the headlines of 20 sites in a few seconds.

As SharpReader sees a new story come in from a site it will pop up a little window in the corner of my screen for about 5 seconds. It looks like this:



Just about any site you can think of now has RSS feeds: news sites, financial site, sports sites, photo sharing sites, blog sites. I can even turn on an RSS feed for my blog if anyone is interested.

Before the hurricanes hit I entered the RSS hurricane feed from NOAA so I could stay up to date with new developments.

This is a list of all the feeds I am currently monitoring at work:

Hurricane RITA
Hacking NetFlix
Slate Magazine
BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition
Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories
Yahoo! News: Most Viewed
New York Times: Science
New York Times: NYT HomePage
New York Times: National
CNN.com
Google Search: nanosolar
Google Search: xmax xg
Google Maps Mania
Scientific American
InfoWorld: Top News
The Register
Slashdot
CNet News.com
New York Times: Technology
Wired News
HowStuffWorks.com
CNN.com - Technology


It is very easy to install SharpReader and get it going. As far as finding RSS feeds, just look on any of the websites you go to regularly and look for a link that says RSS, XML, or Atom. These all mean pretty much the same thing. Click on the link, and then just copy the address of the RSS page into SharpReader. Let me know if you have any questions.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication