Do you find yourself struggling with keeping up-to-date on the latest news in your areas of interest? Do you want a more convenient way to get your daily updates than going to a dozen bookmarked sites? RSS Feeds may be the solution. Almost all websites with continually updated content (such as this blog, for example) use RSS (short for Rich Site Summary, but often also called “Really Simple Syndication”) to push content in a format-neutral form (so that future site redesigns automatically update old content). The plus side is that these RSS feeds can be read by other programs that aggregate them into one place.
Aggregating feeds is done with an RSS reader program. There are a number of them out there, but I recommend Feedly, which is 1) free; 2) available on the web or as an app for iOS and Android; and 3) really clean and user-friendly. You can add feeds by just searching the name of the website or entering the page URL. There are even alternative apps that connect to your Feedly subscriptions if you don’t like Feedly’s interface.
Once you’ve found the Reader you like, you just need to add feeds. Depending on the site and your reader, you can generally just either search for the site or the URL, but you can also look for the RSS feed icon, which looks something like this:
Clicking on the RSS icon will take you to a URL that is just the feed you can add to your reader. Once you’ve added sites, you can then go to your reader and start reading. It’s also easy to add or remove a site at a later time, so you don’t have to worry about getting it right the first time.
To help you get started, here’s a few sites I subscribe to with my RSS reader (with feed URLs):
- This site (obviously)
- Lowering the Bar (Legal Humor)
- SCOTUSblog (Supreme Court news)
- Any site from the Law Professor’s Blog Network
- The Chronicle of Higher Education News
- Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites Blog (Law Technology news)
- Phys.org (science news)
I hope this helps you find ways to keep up-to-date on your latest news.
The Reporter 