RSS feeds for the soul
By Meg Rivera
THE Internet is a weird and wonderful place. I credit most of my research papers to Google Books, without which I never would have sounded semi-knowledgeable about my given topic. I’ve also found out more than I would ever want to know about horseshoes, thanks to the black hole that is Wikipedia. But in the same breath, I also know that the Internet has propagated the strangest viral personalities such as Nyan Cat, zefrank and Antoine Dodson. I haven’t even begun to touch the weird side of the Internet.
With such a mixed bag of what you could possibly find, how can you expect to keep everything in the same place and stay updated? This is where the beauty of RSS feeds come in. RSS (or Rich Site Summary; dubbed Really Simple Syndication by netizens) allows you to keep on top of what you want to see online. An RSS feed takes updates from selected websites and consolidates them all into a single feed for you to read through. This week, we’ll pick through the variety of RSS feeds for your smart device. You’ll never miss an update again, and you get to customise the entire experience in a way that fits you best.
App name: Newsify
App developer: Ben Alexander
Available on: iTunes
Easy to use: Dead simple, truly for the connoisseur
Overall comment: This puts the “simple” in RSS; this is not a difficult app to navigate at all. You don’t need working knowledge of how an RSS feed works, you just need to input the names of web sites you want to keep updated on, and it brings all that information into a single screen for you to browse through at leisure. Not too flashy, but it gets the job done. Three clicks out of five.
App name: Feeddler
App developer: CB Liu
Available on: iTunes, but syncs to Google Reader
Easy to use: This is not an RSS reader per se, since it gathers the websites you want to visit through an account you have to set up via web. It needs a little fiddling around with, and you need a little techie knowledge to use this properly.
Overall comment: This app crosses over platforms, from iOs to Google Reader in a seamless transition. I would say that it has the easy functionality of Newsify, but only if you subscribe to certain websites that gather information for you. Get this only you want a preset list of sites to visit, since it’s not very customisable. Two clicks out of five.
App name: Byline
App developer: Phantom Fish
Available on: iTunes
Easy to use: Yes, in the sense that it’s more accessible than Feeddler. This app doesn’t need any prior subscriptions to work, but it does use various social media accounts to log you into the service.
Overall comment: Feeddler has the added bonus of allowing you to share stories that you like on your social media, which is probably why it asks to be linked to them in the first place. You manually input the websites that you want to follow, and you can go through them according to the category or the genre you can define beforehand. Good on its own, but not great. Two clicks out of five.
