Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time

Recently I realized that not everyone uses or is even aware of syndication feeds for websites/blogs so I thought I would write about them and why they are a good thing. Most blogs and websites that have regular updates have what are called syndication feeds. The term RSS, meaning Really Simple Syndication, is often used to refer to these feeds. Since there are many existing articles defining them in great depth I will link to two of them here:
Wikipedia RSS entry
XML.com’s What Is RSS

Take a moment to look these over if you are unsure as to what syndication is. Now let me tell you why I find it so useful. The other day a friend of mine was tediously plodding through every blog on his list to see if any updates had been posted, just like I used to do. Using something called a feed-reader or news-reader you can eliminate wasted time by only visiting sites that have been updated, or even by reading the updated articles right in your reader. Here’s how it works, you put the address to a websites feed into the reader, for example this websites feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/christophertaverna, then the reader takes the information and displays it for you to see. You can then mark the site as read and the next time something is posted you will see it in your reader. There are many readers out there, some are web based and some are clients you install on your computer. I am a big fan of web based tools, since then it doesn’t matter what computer I am at, I still have access to all of my stuff. The 2 web-based readers I have used are Google Reader and Protopage. I used Google Reader until I found out about Protopage. Both are good readers, but Protopage does more so that is why I use that daily.
From a time management standpoint syndication allows me to track many more websites than I would be able to if I had to click to every one of them every day. Give it a try and see how syndication can work for you.