News: E-mail subscriptions! And a lesson on RSS.

I just want to say that i hate e-mail newsletters. I despise them. In my mind, RSS is much cooler. It’s easier to get an RSS feed than to sign up for an e-mail, and RSS doesn’t clutter up my inbox. I’m subscribed to maybe two e-mail newsletters and about a hundred RSS feeds.
Of course, only about 2% of the internet-using population has a clue what RSS is (i’m one of the ones who not only knows what RSS is and uses RSS, i can code an RSS feed from scratch if i have to. But enough of my own geekiness), so e-mail newsletters are still a bit more popular.

And now… TornCanvas has one.

It’s basically just the TornCanvas sketchblog, run through FeedBurner and set up to be available as an e-mail newsletter. Anyone who already subscribes to my RSS feed won’t be missing anything.

But… i feel i would be lax in my duties as a webmistress if i didn’t explain to all you e-mail users just what an RSS feed is.
Basically, an RSS feed is something you can subscribe to, just like you would subscribe to an e-mail newsletter. Except you don’t need to put in an e-mail address or have it cluttering up your e-mail inbox. If you see something that says “RSS” or looks anything like the standard RSS feed icon, you can just click it to preview an RSS feed, which is usually a list of headlines and parts of articles. You can then click on any headline to go to the full article.
Depending on how you prefer to read RSS feeds, there’s a couple of different ways you can subscribe – in most newer browsers, you can just bookmark it like a normal webpage, except when you look at your bookmarks, there will be a number next to the title showing how many new articles were posted since you last checked (I can’t wait for the day when every bookmark somehow lets you know if the site’s been updated since i was last there). It’s pretty awesome.
Some browsers have pretty decent built-in RSS readers, where you subscribe to an RSS feed and can see all your feeds together. They all have different ways of subscribing, but it’s usually pretty straightforward – somewhere off on the side or near the top of the page will be a message saying something like, “You’re viewing an RSS feed, click here to subscribe!” Then when you feel like reading some feeds, you go back to the browser’s RSS reader, and it’s like having a custom newspaper, made just for you. Very nice.
And then there’s stand-alone RSS readers, like Vienna. If RSS feeds are the e-mail newsletters of the future, RSS readers are like Mail or Outlook. To subscribe to an RSS feed using a stand-alone reader, go to the RSS feed in your browser first, copy whatever’s in the address bar, and then paste that into the box that comes up when you click “New Feed” in your RSS reader.

So now you all know how to use RSS. And if for some reason you don’t like it… there’s an e-mail subscription option to make you happy.