Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

RSS Feeds in Safari
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way for web sites to syndicate their content. This allows
users to subscribe to a web site’s RSS feed, which will contain any updates to the web site. This
is great if you like to visit a large number of web sites frequently, because with RSS, instead of
going to each site to see what’s new, you can get a list of new items from all of the web sites and
filter out what items interest you.
NOTE When is RSS not RSS? When it’s some other type of syndication standard. RSS has
always had a few things that others found as weaknesses. This has resulted in two things: first,
people adding content to RSS feeds that weren’t covered by the RSS standard (Apple, for
example, does this for iTunes podcast feeds); and second, people getting together and inventing
new syndication standards, like ATOM. Most RSS clients, including Safari and Mail, support
ATOM along with RSS—however, they still tend to refer to it all under the blanket of RSS.
Safari contains the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds as easily as adding a bookmark, and
makes a suitable RSS reader with some nice features.
NOTE In Leopard, Apple also added the ability to handle RSS in Mail, which provides a nice
alternative to Safari’s RSS feature. While some items referring to this will come up here, we will
focus on how Safari handles RSS here, and how Mail handles RSS in the next chapter.
NOTE Even though Apple provides a couple of good options for viewing RSS feeds, there are
a number of other third-party applications specifically for handling RSS feeds (called news
aggregators) that add some additional or unique features, or that may help you organize a
large number of feeds in a more suitable way. One such reader is NetNewsWire (www.
newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWire/Default.aspx). NetNewsWire comes in a free lite
version that is suitable for reading RSS feeds, and a full version that adds many extremely
handy features. If you manage lots of RSS feeds, NetNewsWire is definitely worth checking
out.
Adding Feeds
CHAPTER 10 BROWSING THE WEB WITH SAFARI 191
When you are browsing the Web in Safari, whenever you visit a site with an RSS feed, a blue RSS
icon will appear on the far right side of the Address field in Safari’s toolbar (Figure 10-13).
Figure 10-13. A web site that has an RSS feed associated with it will display a blue RSS box in Safari’s
address bar.
Clicking the RSS icon will either open the RSS feed in your browser, or open a list of all the
feeds available if there are more than one. Select the feed you wish to subscribe to from the popup,
and the news feed will open up in Safari (Figure 10-14).
NOTE When you select an RSS feed from within Safari, the RSS feed will open up in the
default RSS newsreader. If your default newsreader is not Safari (e.g., Mail or a third-party RSS
reader), then something else will happen than what is described here.