In this post I’ll briefly explain what RSS is, and how you can use it in your professional life to keep on top of the latest news and events in translation and beyond.
RSS = Really Simple Syndication = A simple, no nonsense feed of the latest posts from a website. An RSS client shows you how many new posts are waiting to be read from a tailored list of sites. It then goes on to display them to you in a simple and usually very efficient way.
Google Reader used to be one of the most popular RSS clients available, however that was shuttered last summer, leaving millions of users to find a replacement. I went through a fair few alternatives in 2013, with the ultimate goal of hosting the client myself from a Raspberry Pi (small, low energy, versatile computer). This limited my choice to the lightweight clients, such as TinyTinyRSS, Miniflux and Newsbeuter (which is nice German wordplay for News ‘Hunter-gatherer’). I settled on the latter, for ease of use, speed and simplicity, with Miniflux picking up the slack for more image-heavy sites.
I’m probably not in the majority when opting for ‘host your own’ RSS clients, so here is a link to Wikipedia’s selection of RSS clients for Windows/Mac/Linux etc. Feedly seems to be widely praised as a nice visual, hosted replacement for Google Reader.
I suppose that’s enough of an introduction for now. Let me know if you have any questions, but otherwise it’s pretty straightforward once you’re set up.