You may be new to RSS and RSS feeds so I will try not to get too technical here. For you techno XML RSS and Atom nerd’s, this stuff will be overly basic and probably far too boring for you. My intent is to answer some of the questions I get from users that are new to this RSS stuff.

Note that you can do the stuff mentioned in this post on other RSS-Mix sites, just going to use this site as an example since we like you hanging out here.

I am attempting to make this info fun to learn, it really is a great tool (mixing feeds) if you know what you are after. This will be the story…

A young business professional named Simon Raganbacher (I’m making this up) has subscriptions to a number of newspapers and magazines that get delivered to his home daily, weekly, and monthly (depending on the subscription). Simon has a subscription to the Washington Post, the New Yorker, People magazine, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, Investors Business Daily, Rolling Stone, and Cosmopolitan (his roommate reads that one but he peeks at once in awhile).

Like many young business professionals, Simon is a real busy guy. Often times he finds that he doesn’t even read through the bulk of material in the magazines and newspapers he gets, he just scans through headlines and picks out topics he is interested in. Simon travels a lot, and would probably read more of his magazines if he had them with him while he was at hotels during trips, but he hates to lug around extra stuff when he’s traveling. Simon has a computer at home, a laptop that he uses when traveling, and nearly all the hotels he stays in have free wireless access. Most also have free computers to use in the lobby and/or in business areas.

One day Simon meets another young business professional while traveling. He tells her about his situation and it turns out she reads Cosmopolitan too! This other savvy business professional (we’ll call her Lisa) proceeds to tell Simon the he could probably get most of the key news and information that are in his favorite newspapers and magazines online. Simon tells Lisa he already does that from time to time. He goes from web site to web site looking for the content he likes to read. What sucks though, is it takes some time to check all the different sites, and sometimes Simon just wants to browse through the latest stuff and not be bothered by trying to remember multiple website URLs and such.

Lisa tells Simon, “I’m going to teach you to KickRSS!” “I beg your pardon” says Simon, “you are going to teach me to kick some what?” “KickRSS.com, it’s a web site, one of many, that enables you to put all of your favorite news and magazine content together in one place. You can index your favorite sports sections, stock quotes, news videos, and a lot more. Let’s go online and see if the magazines and newspapers you’re interested in support RSS.”

“What’s RSS?” asked Simon. “RSS stands for really simple syndication but it’s really not that important. Few people care what MP3 stands for, they just want to be able to listen to music. Let me just show you how to use RSS and make it work for you.” Lisa decides to show Simon how to create a personal KickRSS feed mix so that he can access news and information from his favorite magazines and newspapers all in one place.

Step One: Simon goes to the KickRSS.com homepage and clicks on the “create a feed” button (or image). What he is really doing is creating a user account. The account he creates will become the name of his personal RSS feed (which will be visible to others as a URL). Simon decides on something creative and names his feed “RSSimon.” He puts in his e-mail address (which is private and not shared with anyone) and creates a password that he’ll be able to remember in the event he’s at a hotel somewhere and wants to check his feed from the computer in the hotel lobby.

He notices that the KickRSS web site is not very fancy but Lisa assures him that he’ll be able to organize his favorite RSS feeds all into one place, and that’s what’s most important. “It’s a free RSS tool Simon and they’ve probably got a ton of other things they are working on. I’m sure they’ll continue to make the site better as RSS mixing grows in popularity.”

Step Two: Simon has created his feed name “RSSimon” and he clicks on the “Manage Feed” button so that he can login and begin to create his mix. Lisa points out that there are no feeds added yet so he should first click on the button that says “add feed” which is on the left-hand side of the screen. A message appears that reads “To add a feed, enter its URL (including the initial http://) it into the box below and click “Add Feed”. It may take a short while to get the feed information - so once you’ve clicked “Add Feed” please be patient!”

“Let’s open up another web browser tab and locate those URLs we want to add” says Lisa. “We probably could have first created a list of RSS feed URLs and then all we’d have to do is enter them here. Since this is our first time we’ll search for each feed and then put them in one by one.”

“How do I know what to look for?” asked Simon. “Don’t worry, I’ll try to make this easy and walk you through it each step of the way” says Lisa. “I say we just go to a search engine like Google and type in some of your favorite magazines along with the term RSS and see what comes up.” Lisa and Simon decide to first look up Cosmopolitan RSS and they were in luck. It turns out that iVillage has a Cosmo RSS feed and even has a page that tells a little bit more about what RSS is (many sites do).

Step Three: Copy the URL of the RSS feed you want to add and paste it into the ad feed box on KickRSS.

Simon copies the RSS URL from the browser window and pastes it into the ad feed box. “I got an error Lisa, it says something about not being able to verify the feed.”

“Click the back button on your browser and try it again Simon, I noticed a blog post on KickRSS one-time that said that sometimes happens. They are working on fixing that.” Simon tried it again and this time it was a success. Cosmo Daily Headlines are now available in Simon’s RSS feed. “Let’s add some more, this is looking like a KickRSS web tool!”

Simon and Lisa proceeded to search for the other newspapers and magazines online to see if they offered content in RSS. They found Playboy so they added that. They searched for Washington Post RSS and found nearly the whole paper was available online as syndicated content. From the Post, Simon just wanted information on investing so he copied that URL over to his KickRSS account and pasted it into the add feed box. He also wanted topics related to the NFL and some other sports so he copied both the NFL RSS link and the sports link and pasted each of those into his ad feed box.

The RSS feed for the New Yorker was a little bit more difficult to find but after doing a Google search for “New Yorker RSS” Simon found the XML file link he needed to add to his mix. People magazine organized their RSS content into individual feeds (sort of like the Washington Post did) so Simon could just pick the subjects he was interested in. He went with “Top Stories” and added that URL to his mix. Sports Illustrated also categorized their content which made it easy for Simon to just grab the information related to the NFL, since that’s the section in the magazine he found himself reading the most.

Investors Business Daily also had neatly organized content so Simon decided to grab information on business and investing, which were two separate feeds. The last magazine to check was Rolling Stone and it turns out they had an online “Rolling Stone Rock and Roll Daily” blog section which Simon added to his KickRSS mix.

“Wow, this is awesome! I have all my favorite topics in one place and I can view them from anywhere in the world” said Simon, I’m going to save so much time. “As long as you have internet access and a Web browser you should be able to access your mix content anytime” said Lisa. “In fact, you don’t need to install an RSS reader, since that’s what KickRSS does on the backend. They convert your XML formatted RSS feeds into readable content so that you can browse through it from the web site user pages. You can also view just the content from each individual source by clicking on links that are on the left side of the screen.”

“Let’s take a look at my finished RSS mix from the user page” said Simon. “OK Simon, go to the KickRSS homepage and click on “browse feeds.” Simon noticed that there were hundreds, maybe even thousands of feed mixes on the users page. “KickRSS is working to improve the way they sort user feeds, I saw that in a blog post too” said Lisa. “Since your feed is new it’s probably at the very bottom. Since you gave it a unique name it won’t be hard to find. In fact, using Internet Explorer or Firefox, you can use the control + F keys on your keyboard to search the feeds for user names you’re interested in.”

Simon locates his feed mix and clicks on the link. A new page loads with recent headlines and descriptions from all the newspapers and magazines he has collected information from. “Look Lisa, Prince is going to headline the NFL Super Bowl halftime show in 2007, very cool!” Simon moved closer to Lisa and began to party like it was 1999. “Not so fast Romeo, just because I KickRSS, it doesn’t mean I won’t kick your ass if you try getting all groovy on me.”
So there you have it, a story (yes it’s corny) of how one user was able to organize all of his favorite content into a KickRSS feed mix and view it from anywhere in the world, as long as he had an internet connection and could remember the URL… KickRSS.com!

You can view Simons custom KickRSS feed mix here: http://www.kickrss.com/RSSimon

Note: There are other sites that allow you to do the same (or similar) kinds of things you can at KickRSS.com, I just wanted to give you some insight into what one can do here. Save your feeds and save a tree. If you’re wondering why someone traveling doesn’t just add their favorite RSS feeds to a My Yahoo! or Google account, one thought I can offer is that a visitor to KickRSS does not have to log in to view a custom feed mix. That is a nice plus when sitting at a hotel computer that’s accessed by tons of people and is usually on an insecure and open network connection.