We introduced a very exciting and important feature today.  Don’t let the jargon distract you, this is one you want to understand because can be a real game-changer.

Essentially RSS is like an Inbox for web content.  You subscribe to the web sites that you’re interested in, then as new articles are added to the sites the updates are automatically delivered to you in a neat stream like email.  Learn more about RSS…

Our new RSS feeds send updates to the subscriber when any activity on a Blog is added, modified, commented on, or deleted and when tasks are completed.  With RSS people can monitor what is going on without having to log into their account.

The RSS button is on the top right of every Project Blog page.  To activate a feed simply click on the button, enter an email address and click activate.  A secure RSS feed will be created for that particular user and an email with be sent with instructions on how to subscribe to it.

The data available on a feed follows the same rules as the Publish (as a web page) feature.  Information that relates to other parts of the system such as Tags and Related-to fields are not shown making it suitable to create feeds for clients and contractors to keep them in the loop on certain projects (while not disclosing any internal information unintentionally).

All your RSS feeds are protected using a unique web address and password.  You’ll need to use a feed reader that supports RSS authentication (most do).  The RSS reader will prompt you to enter a username and password to access your feed.  RSS readers are available as stand alone programs and integrated into all current web browsers and desktop email clients.

A note about web-based RSS readers You should not subscribe to Blog feeds with a web-based feed reader that doesn’t guarantee your feeds are kept private (otherwise other people or search engines may be able to see your feed data).  You should confirm your feed will be kept private with the company that provides your feed reader service.

Since I started using RSS a few years ago it has fundamentally changed the way I use the web.  Instead of jumping from website to website to keep on top of the topics I’m interested in, I subscribe to various blogs and website feeds and scan the result a couple of times a day.  My Google RSS reader reports: “From your 213 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 17,987 items.”  I’ve been monitoring 600 relevant articles ever day and I doubt you’d catch me doing it.

Here is a list of popular RSS readers can be found at http://is.gd/4yFY and http://is.gd/iXDu

MSIE7 does not support authenticated RSS feeds and will not properly.  The current version of Outlook 2007 appears to work okay despite rumors that it has the same issue as IE7.