Do you speak my language: R is for RSS, Router, Root, Ruby

R is for RSS, Router, Root, Ruby

Quite a good selection for R, and I think I am going to have to go with RSS.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is an internet data standard that is typically used for 'pushing' frequently updated data to users. These data are usually blog entries, news, automated searches (Google has a great way of setting these up - see below) etc. In fact, this blog has an RSS feed. It is just up there, below the projector, it is the orange one that looks the same as the orange image below on the left and is the last one on the right after the F, T and the + in boxes above.

The great thing about RSS feeds is they save you work and time. For example, suppose you regularly visit 4 or 5 different websites everyday to see if there is anything new posted, if those sites had RSS feeds then updates would be delivered to you automatically if you subscribed to the RSS feeds. The net result here is you wouldn't have to visit the sites everyday just to see if there was something new, and you would be alerted to new material as soon as it was posted.

In my new year tech predictions blog post (see 10 eLearning Predictions for 2011 (now with an extra 10% for free)) I rather cheekily suggested that RSS would be killed off in 2011. I now must confess that I was 'flame baiting' with that comment (see F for Flame Baiting - Do you speak my language: F is for Frontend, FORTRAN, Facebook, FAQ, Firewall (Firewire), Flame, Flame Bait, FTP, FTPS). I really can't see RSS falling in to disuse as it is such a useful standard, and as I said above, it is has so many potential uses. However, I have personally noticed that I no longer use my RSS newsreader, but instead tend to get all my news via Twitter.

An article by Dave Winer (How to reboot RSS) has a great description of RSS, and explains why my prediction of the death of RSS are premature. As Dave says:

"RSS is doing fine. It forms the pipes through which news flows. Nowadays there are some new-fangled faucets called Twitter and Facebook. But behind the scenes, connecting it all together is RSS"

And Dave should know what he is talking about as he 'invented' RSS (Did you invent RSS?) - the quotes on 'invented' are there because he says he didn't invent it.

RSS feed use XML (see X in the series) to transmit the data, and as this data is organised in a pre-agreed format it means that data can be easily shared between websites and computer programs.

How can I use it in my teaching?

Well, if you run a teaching blog then the chances are you already use RSS as blogging software such as Wordpress (see W in this series) comes with an RSS feed built in. To save your students from having to continuously check your blog they could subscribe to the RSS feed. In addition, most wiki (see W in the series) software has an RSS feed built is, so, again, subscribing to that feed means you receive an update everytime a page changes.

You can also encourage your students to set up their own RSS feeds. For example, suppose you use Twitter, and your students don't, you could get them to follow your tweets by subscribing to the RSS feed for your account (for more information on this see: Twitter: How To Find Your RSS Feed).

You could also get your students to create and then subscribe to a RSS feed from Google for specific search terms (called Google Alerts), or news feeds. (More on: Google News Feeds and Google Alerts).

Another really useful thing you and your students can do with RSS feeds is to set up are automated search feeds from PubMed. To set one up is very easy, you just run a search at PubMed as normal, and then click on the RSS icon (a smaller version of icon above) to create an RSS feed. The feed can then be used with your favourite RSS feed reader to regularly collect search updates for published papers. This approach saves you and your students from having to run the search every day.

The other Rs in the list:

Router: This is a bit of hardware (see H - Do you speak my language: H is for htaccess, hacker, host, http, https, html, hardware) that, well, routes traffic through the internet so it gets to the right place.

Root: This is the 'top' user on a Linux, Unix or Mac OS X machine. If you have 'root privileges' then you can do anything, including setting up users, reconfiguring the machine, and reading other users emails and documents.

Ruby: A very popular scripting language that is used a lot in the development of websites.

Protein: 3GFT

Image: wikipedia

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