OK, I downloaded Opera 7.50 just a few days ago and started to play around a bit. One thing I really looked forward to try was the integrated RSS feed-reader - what Opera calls Newsfeed, and others webfeed.
Admittedly, it's not a new technology, but I just haven't been curious enough to download and install a separate rss-reader. Not knowing what it actually was, and if it was of any interest to me, wasn't the greatest incentives for that. Opera changed the picture.
These days, it's best to have an updated browser. That doesn't just mean the latest version of a browser - it means a new browser. Internet Explorer is already a few years old, and is lagging behind many others. It can be nice to have on a few sites, but personally I'd recomment to update to another browser. My favourite is Opera, as you may guess, but Mozilla/Firefox is also a nice one I've tried. Anyway, I downloaded the latest Opera, and with it I got the integrated newsfeed - and it would be just silly not to try it.
So I did. And I discovered that it really was a nice feature. Headlines from different newspapers, updates from interesting blogs, a newsfeed version of a newsletter I'm subscribing to: Great. And all of it coming to me - I don't have to go out searching for the news. To have a newsfeed version of that newsletter is a neat feature, too, as it has many interesting links, and now I get them straight to my browser. I still have to click them as if it was an email, so no difference there, but a slightly different way to work. I like it.
In fact, I thought it so nice I started looking into how to make a newsfeed myself, for my own site. Earlier I thought of it as too much work for too little use - but that was earlier. As it proved more useful than I expected, I read a bit and found that getting started really wasn't as intimidating as my first impression would have me believe. It can't have been the greatest articles I've read earlier, because it's really simple. Maybe I'll find some tools later that makes it even simpler, but for now a text editor is all I need.
So, do you have an RSS/newsfeed reader? Want to subscribe to mine? My newsfeed is here - just copy the url for that page into your newsfeed reader and off you go. Now, I'm going to look deeper into how RSS works - maybe I come up with something even more useful? I look forward to find out.
