Subscribing to BYU MUG’s RSS feeds

The BYU Mac Users Group offers several forms of syndicated content including calendar events, article posts, and comments that users leave. For those new to RSS, it is a form of syndication in which text is published and a reader displays it. In a similar way to a television show being broadcast across air waves and a television receiving the signal and displaying the program, an RSS reader (or “agregator”) reads a feed from a website and displays each article and keeps track of what has and has not read.

There are many ways to via RSS feeds. There are dedicated readers and then there are applications that have added this feature such as web browsers and email clients. Safari added this ability with the release of version two that shipped with Mac OS 10.4. Websites that offer syndicated content will usually state so on their home page or in the footer of the site. Look for the words “syndication,” “feed,” “RSS,” and/or small orange icons with similar text. Many web browsers also now automatically detect sites with feeds and display a graphic letting you know that it is available.

Safari does this with the blue “RSS” icon that appears in the address bar:

You will notice that this is the case when viewing this website. Clicking the “RSS” button in the address bar will switch Safari into RSS view mode, displaying all of the articles in a text-only format.

Personally, I find this way of consuming news not very user friendly. It is fine for a one-time quick glance on a new website, but for the feeds that I subscribe to daily, it does not work very well for several reasons. First, it does not keep track of what articles I have read and it also requires that I visit every website individually to view their feeds—something that I feel negates the very benefit of feeds. For this reason, I use the dedicated reader New News Wire Lite by NewsGator. It allows me to browse through new content from over seventy feeds within a seconds. I have even configured custom key strokes through the Keyboard System Preference Pane to allow me to navigate as quickly as possible.

To subscribe to BYU MUG’s feeds in New News Wire Lite, right-click on the one of the feeds links in the footer of the website and select “Copy Link.” Then switch to New News Wire Lite and select New Subscription from the File Menu. The feed that you have copied will appear, pre-polulated in the New Subscription dialogue, requiring you to only click the Subscribe button to complete the process. This new feed will then appear in the feed list along with other feeds that you have subscribed to. You can even create folders to organize your feeds into.