In one of our older posts, I wrote about using feedreaders and aggregators to keep up-to-date on blogs, journals, etc. These work great when the site you want to read have an RSS feed. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is simply a format that retrieves updated content from a webpage. A feedreader (or aggregator) grabs the “feed” and displays the updated content for you to read. No more having to visit the website daily to see if something changed or was updated.
Many sites have an RSS feed and make the process of adding the content to your feedreader fairly painless. In general the process works something like this…look for the RSS icon, click it, and choose the reader you want to send the content to, and click subscribe.
Subscribing to an RSS Feed
But what about sites that do not have an RSS feed explicitly in place? It turns out that there are third-party applications that can piece together an RSS feed for these sites as well. There are several of these applications available online. I have used Page2RSS and had pretty good luck.
Just enter the URL of the site you want to keep tabs on into the “Page URL” box and click the “to RSS” button. This will produce another URL that can be copied and pasted into your feedreader or subscribed to directly.
I have successfully used this to add RSS feeds from many sites and journals to my feedreader. Below is a shot from Feedly (my current reader) on my iPad Mini of updated content (as of this morning) on the Journal of Statistics Education website.
