Shane Bell

The other day I made a passing comment about RSS to a group of colleagues only to be confronted with a series of blank looks saying "what's RSS?". I almost fell over!

I was amazed that a group of technology professionals didn't know what RSS was. And even worse is that they're missing out on such a useful tool.

For those who don't know (shame on you), RSS is basically a simple XML content feed that allows you to "subscribe" to information of interest to you. RSS, or it's cousin ATOM, is mostly used for news and blogs to save you the trouble of going to each of your favourite sites each day to see if there's anything new.

For example, this blog has an ATOM feed here that you can subscribe to. By using an RSS reader (there's loads of them out there) or a website that does the job for you like Bloglines you'll be notified of anything new automatically. It saves you a ton of time and means you're always the first to know what's going on.

I have a number of feeds that I read to keep me up to date on what's going on in the world of Java and technology in general. Here are a few of my favourites...

• The Server Side
• Signals vs Noise
• Jonathan Schwartz
• James Gosling
• Joel On Software
• OnJava.com
• Paul Graham
• The Java Posse
• Martin Fowler
• I, Cringely
• Bruce Tate

My tool of choice for RSS feeds is Mozilla Thunderbird. Mainly because I already use it for my personal email, but also because it works really well and gives you a great email-esque feel to your feeds which I think makes a lot of sense for most feeds.

So don't be one of the uninformed, go and subscribe to some feeds and be one of the people who know what's going on in the world.