RSS Feeds

Keeping up with the things that interest you can be time consuming. In fact, one of the best things about Church Production Magazine is that it arrives on my desk each month giving me an excuse to pause and browse.

But, I actually read a lot more than Church Production (sorry Brian).  Wired is always worth looking at.  As is Fast Company and a few dozen others.  And then if you add the blogs I track….well, it can get to be a bit overwhelming. 

Then along came RSS feeds.  RSS is short for really simple syndication.  The beauty of RSS feeds is that they are an easy way to get information from a site you are interested in whenever new information is available.

Feed Readers display the RSS feeds in a synoptic fashion allowing you to explore what you want and ignore what you don’t.  There are several available.  Google Reader is a good one. As is the RSS feed manager on the Flock browser. NetNews Wire is a popular one for Mac OS X. Microsoft Outlook 2007 includes an RSS feed reader that is fairly simple to set up.  (On the Tools menu, click Account Settings and access the RSS Feeds tab to set up.) And Yahoo Widgets has several RSS readers which put the latest information right on your desktop, where it lays out what’s new whenever that part of your desktop isn’t covered up by some other window. 

Most work the same way.  You add links to your subscription list, then when new information is posted, it shows up on your reader.

So, what happens if you are using one RSS service and decide to switch to another?  Most have an import/export feature that will allow you to transfer your list via an .opml file.  So, if you want to test drive one for awhile, then try another, you don’t have to spend a lot of time typing.

As a side note, editorial content from worshipfacilities.com is available via RSS. (As is this column.)

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