dizzysoft softwareKeep up with your favorite websites with RSS
What’s great about RSS feeds is you are updated with information that you specifically asked for whenever you want to check it. This convenience is making me lazy because whenever I come across a website without an RSS feed I wonder how I am supposed to know when the information on it changes. Is there a way to be updated about the changes on a website without visiting it all the time? Yes there is and RSS can help.
For example, lets take a look at a couple of websites that I want to watch: the KU Men’s basketball news and the Pocket Civ website.
For starters, if we simply want to know when a site has changed, we could use page2rss. Give this site an address and it will create an RSS feed that notifies you when the page changes. The advantage of this is that it is really easy to use. The limitation is that there will be a lot of “false-positives”- in other words, you will be notified when things on that site change even if its nothing of any consequence. This is good for a static page like the Pocket Civ site. Whenever an update for Pocket Civ is released, there’s no telling how the site might change, so this is probably the best way to keep track of this site. Note that the results of this RSS feed can be confusing, however. The best way to use this service is to look at the site yourself once the feed tells you there has been a change.
Sometimes there is a particular piece of information you are interested in that is hosted on a website- such as a list of information. For example, the news releases on the KU men’s basketball site. This list is updated regularly. If we were to simply use page2rss on this site we would know when the site was changed no matter how it was changed- giving us a mess of indeciperable information when we are only interested in a new news release. If we were to ask feedity to create an RSS feed from the same page, it can automatically detect the list of news releases for us, updating the feed when a new news release is issued.
