With the ever growing speed that we live our lives now a days we barely have time to exist let alone scour the web aimlessly to keep track of all the things we find interesting. Enter site feeds.

Pretty much every site you visit today offers you a chance to subscribe to it’s content via feeds, out of all the feed standards RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is most likely the most popular today. RSS started out back in 1999 with RSS 0.9 evolved from there to the current incarnation which is 2.0.10. RSS is a way of gathering a sites content and publishing it to a standardized XML file format allowing the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs.

The feed will look something like this:

To utilize these feeds you will need a reader that can take the XML from the feeds and output it in a easy to read format. These readers can be stand alone applications, parts of other applications, widgets or online web sites even. Here are a few examples:

Desktop clients:

Akregator, AOL Explorer, Avant Browser, Blam!, BlogBridge, BottomFeeder, Camino, Canto, Claws Mail, Cooliris, Epiphany, eSobi, FeedDemon, Feedreader, Feedview, Flock, FreeRange WebReader, Gnus, Hubdog, IBM Lotus Notes, iCab, Internet Explorer, K-Meleon, Kazehakase, Liferea, Mail, Maxthon, mDigger, Mercury Messenger, Microsoft Outlook, Mindity, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, NetNewsWire, Netscape Browser, Netscape Messenger 9, Netscape Navigator 9, NewsAccess, NewsBreak , Newsbeuter, NewsFire, NewsFox, Omea, OmniWeb, Opera Mail, Pegasus Mail, RSS Bandit, RSSOwl, Safari, Sage, SeaMonkey, Shiira, Sleipnir, Snarfer, Tencent Traveler, The Bat!, Thinfeeder, Vienna, Windows Live Mail, Zimbra

Web based clients:

aideRSS, AmphetaDesk, Bloglines, Cheetah News, Daylife, Drupal, Fastladder, Feedzilla, Google News, Google Reader, iGoogle, Imooty.eu, Live.com, mDigger, Newsknowledge, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Planet, Rojo.com, Spokeo, Yahoo!

I myself always use Google Reader since it’s available to me via any device that can get online, it has a very good user interface and way more features than I’ll ever use.

Here is a picture of how my Google Reader feed view is in both Firefox and on my iPhone:

Now a days I almost never visit web sites with dynamic content directly except if I come across a link to a new site I haven’t visited before. Almost every noteworthy site on the internet today offers a RSS feed for you to subscribe to it’s content, be it a all inclusive feed or for partial site content. Almost every news site, blog, video or file hosting site and any site with dynamic content has a content feed.

If a site with dynamic content doesn’t have a subscription feed maybe it doesn’t care about it’s visitors and maybe you shouldn’t waste your time with them. There are a few exceptions to this where you can’t get a feed for a site that has good content but for those site it’s usually really easy to build your own content parser and create your own RSS feed for the content as long as the site’s html is properly structured.

For those that are interested here is list of the feeds I currently follow (and a link to my feed), if you have suggestions for other feeds I should be following please e-mail them to me:

- Big Download Blog (A blog with news on Windows games)
- Calculated Risk (A great financial blog)
- Consumerist (A blog about consumer protection)
- Dagdraumar (The Dagdraumar’s group blog)
- Daily Show Videos (A feed for videos from the Daily Show)
- Engadget (A blog for gadget freaks)
- Font.is (Sigurður Ármannsson’s blog)
- Freakonomics (A economic blog with a twist)
- FT.com (Financial Times news about the UK)
- Helgi Vífill Júlíusson (Helgi Vífill Júlíusson’s blog)
- Jónas Haraldsson (Jónas Haraldsson’s blog)
- Maclantic(Maclantic.is news about Apple)
- MacOSXHints.com (Hints for MacOS X)
- MacRumors (Rumors and news about Apple)
- Mbl.is – Tækni (Technology news from MBL.is)
- Mbl.is – Viðskipti (Financial news from MBL.is)
- MikeCarey.net (Mike Carey’s blog)
- Nintendo DS (A blog with news on Nintendo DS games)
- Not Always Right (A feed with stupid retail store experiences)
- PhillyD.tv (Philip DeFranco’s video show)
- Silfur Egils (Egill Helgason’s blog)
- The Big Picture (THE BEST FINANCIAL BLOG IN THE WORLD)
- TUAW (A blog with news on Apple)
- VB.is (Financial news from VB.is)
- Vísir – Viðskipti innlent (Financial news from visir.is)
- Wealth Pilgrim (Neal Frankle’s blog)

Related posts from the blog:

• I’m back to blogging
• It starts