|
 |
|||||||||
        |
||||||||||
|
What's the oldest tree on campus? Illustration by Bo Brown Dear Benny, For the past few months, I’ve noticed a lot of little orange boxes labeled with the letters “RSS” on some of my favorite web sites. And recently, another one of these mysterious orange boxes appeared on the Penn News site. Can you tell me what these things are? — Not A Techie Dear RSS Newbie, Yes, those little orange boxes are increasingly common these days, and with good reason, too: So-called RSS (it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”) makes it remarkably easy for anyone to digest large amounts of information, without having to spend hours surfing the web. The beauty of RSS is that it enables you to have up-to-the-minute web content delivered directly to your computer, saving you the trouble of going out and looking for it. For example, if you’re a regular online reader of The New York Times, you probably access Times news by going to the web site. If you had an RSS reader, however, those new Times articles would be sent directly to your reader, along with any other content you wish to have regular access to—everything from National Public Radio programs and comic strips to weather forecasts and sports scores. To use RSS, you’ll first have to get an RSS reader—and once
you have that, the rest takes care of itself. There are many free readers
available. While some of them require that you download them onto your
computer (Sage, for example) Google and Yahoo puts RSS to use right on
your browser (if you have a customizable My Yahoo page, you may be using
RSS without knowing it). To learn more about RSS (from people who know
it better than we do), visit http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/rss.php.
|
||||
ASK
BENNY