Do you find yourself spending an increasing amount of time checking sites for new content, or signing up to dozens of mailing lists just so you can be notified of changes to sites in which you're interested? Wish there was a better way?

Well, there is: syndication. It's free, fast to set up, and very easy to use, even if you're not an official SOLO Geek

Overview

The idea is quite simple: sites publish 'feeds', which are periodically downloaded by a program called an 'aggregator'. That aggregator lets you know (by playing a sound, popping up a window, or similar) that one of the sites you're monitoring has new content.

Getting Started

First, you need to download and install an aggregator. For the purposes of this article I'll play the numbers game and assume you're using Microsoft Windows, so I suggest Sharpreader. If you're using some other operating system, I've included a few useful links later in this article.

Once it's installed, all you need to do is give it the addresses of the feeds you'd like it to monitor. If you look at the right-hand bar on SOLO, you'll see a 'Syndicate' heading, under which is a little orange box labelled 'XML'. Right-click on it, and choose either 'Copy Shortcut' or 'Copy Link Location', depending upon whether you're using Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Then, open SharpReader, go to the 'File' menu, and choose 'Open RSS Feed'. Paste in the URL to the SOLO feed, and put a check in the 'Subscribe to feed' checkbox. Click okay, and you'll see a list of recent posts appear for SOLO.

That's it, really. You can add more feeds, or add categories and organise your feeds. If you're only interested in particular areas of a site, look carefully, & you might find it offers a separate feed for each category.

You can also change the polling frequency, to make SharpReader check particular feeds more frequently. Beware though: some site admins take a dim view of polling more than once every half-hour or so due to the load this puts on their servers. The wusses

SharpReader in Action

Here's a screenshot of SharpReader in action on my PC - note the list of sites on the left-hand side, the list of items on the current site at the top-right, and the details of the current item on the bottom-right.

Here's another screenshot, this one of the Task Bar popup raised by Sharpreader to notify me of new content on SOLO:

Other Operating Systems

If you're using Mac OS X or later, you probably won't need to install any software to subscribe to feeds; see Safari RSS for easy instructions on how to use the RSS functionality built in to the Safari web browser.

If you're using one of the many flavours of Linux, you might find there's an RSS reader already installed; if not, check out RSS Readers for Linux for a good overview of what's available.