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Enter RSS, a technology that lets you subscribe to feeds—summary blurbs
provided by thousands of sources around the world, from Reuters to Apple to
your nerdy next-door neighbor. The result: You spare yourself the tediousness
of checking for updates manually, plus you get to read short summaries of
new articles without ads and blinking animations. And if you want to read a
full article, you just tap its headline.
RSS either stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. each
abbreviation explains one aspect of RSS—either its summarizing talent or its
simplicity.
Safari, as it turns out, doubles as a handy RSS reader. Whenever you tap an“RSS
Feed” link on a Web page, or whenever you type the address of an RSS feed
into the Address bar (it often begins with feed://), Safari automatically displays
a handy table-of-contents view that lists all of the news blurbs on that page.
Scan through the summaries—and when you see an article that looks intriguing,
tap its headline. You go to the full-blown Web page to read the full-blown
article.
it’s worth bookmarking your favorite RSS feeds. one great one for tech fans is
feed://www.digg.com/rss/index.xml, a constantly updated list of the coolest and most
interesting tech and pop-culture stories of the day. Most news publications offer
news feeds, too. (Your humble author’s own daily New York Times blog has a feed
that’s http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/?feed=rss2.)
Chapter 7