Tuesday, May 31, 2005

RSS and SharpReader

Ok, I've been using SharpReader to subscribe to multiple RSS feeds for more than a week now.

I was first really apprehensive--I mean, this is essentially web browsing for me using an email reader instead of IE. But, the more I used it, the more I finally "got" why it's such a powerful tool.

Once you learn of an RSS feed that you're interested in, you simply instruct SharpReader to open that feed and subscribe to it. SharpReader will then periodically download the XML and notify you when there's new content, much like an email reader would. It definitely saves on the time spent browsing the same sites looking for changes, that's for sure!

I still think that there's a niche for my personal portal concept. The power of RSS is that the content is easily extracted and transformed, so it fits perfectly into this idea.