The fine folks over at RSSDay.org have declared today to be RSS Appreciation Day. Following along in the spirit of things, I’ve decided to give a quick little primer on RSS feeds and how you can use them to make your use of the Internet one heck of a lot easier.

Okay, so, if you’re anything like me, the number one reason you use the Internet is to gather information. And it really doesn’t matter what kind of information you are getting - the daily news, tech reviews, friend updates from MySpace and Facebook, the latest scientific article, whatever. You probably also make a habit of visiting the same websites on a regular basis, because you like the content or maybe just because you like the way it is presented.

Now, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it is simply a way for you to gather information from websites that update their content on a regular basis without having to visit the website over and over again. An RSS document, known as a feed, contains either a quick summary or the full content from a website’s update.

In order to make use of an RSS feed, you first need a feed reader. The two most common that I’ve seen in use are Google Reader and Bloglines. I personally use the latter, but you can use whatever feed reader you want. Most email programs including Outlook and Thunderbird now capture RSS feeds as well.

Once you’ve selected a feed reader, take a moment and visit one of your favorite websites and subscribe to their feed. You can do so by clicking on the orange feed icon either in the navigation bar of your browser or on the web page itself as shown in this image from my other website, Josephnassise.com.

Once you click on the icon you’ll be redirected to a page where you can subscribe to that feed with one or two clicks of your mouse. From that point on, to read the latest content from your site, all you have to do is visit your feedreader.

I regularly read about 50 sites per day, so this saves me a tremendous amount of time. By calling up my feed reader, I can read all the latest content from one location and not have to waste all that time jumping from page to page. If the content isn’t anything I’m interested in, I can simply skip it and move on to the next feed.

So there you have it, RSS feeds in a nut shell. So what are you waiting for? Go subscribe to something. You can even start with this site right here!

Like many writers I know, I’m a pack rat when it comes to information. Anything I see or read or hear that I think might be useful for a story at some point or another gets clipped or bookmarked or jotted down for safekeeping.

The trouble with this is that until recently I didn’t have a useful way of storing this information for future use. My magazine or newspaper clippings went into one big file folder, making it near impossible to find anything quickly. My internet bookmarks were more organized, but there were so many of them that even that system became clunky after only a short time. And I won’t even mention what happened to all those notes jotted down on napkins or the nearest scrap of paper.

Clearly I needed a better system.

And I found one in Evernote.

Evernote bills itself as allowing you to “easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere.”

So far it has lived up to its hype.

Evernote is now my way of capturing information that I might want to use at some point in one of my books. Maybe it is a web full page or a snippet of text from one. Maybe it is a photo, be it from my digital camera, my cell phone, or someplace like Flickr. Maybe it is an email or a portion of a chat log. Scanned information. To do lists. You name it and Evernote can capture it.

Evernote has a desktop application (for both Windows and Mac) and a web application. Anything you add to it can be synchronized across all your devices, from your desktop to your laptop to your mobile phone. I have it set up so it provides links from both my email application (Outlook) and my web browser (Firefox) so all I have to do is highlight and click on the link to capture the information I want to save.

Once the information is in Evernote, you can file it using a variety of methods and this is where the true versatility of the app comes into play for me. Multiple notebooks allow me to file information for different books projects together in one place regardless of the type of data I’m saving. Or I can choose to file similar data together – all my photos in one notebook, all my web clippings in another, etc. Either way, a robust tagging system lets me search for similar clippings across multiple notebooks.

The Search feature is particularly cool, as it searches not only the text in your notes, but also the text in any pictures you might have saved. I use Bloglines as my news reader and tend to save a lot of articles in their built in Clippings service, but the additional ability to search through images for text provided by Evernote has caused me to begin saving my latest clippings direct to Evernote instead. As time goes on I’ll probably move my older clippings there as well, since I can find things easier that way. There is nothing more annoying that knowing you’ve saved something and not being able to find it!

 

Evernote is in beta right now and you need an invitation to try it out. You can go to their website and sign up (it didn’t take me long to get an invite this way) or, you can leave a comment on this post and I’ll pick five random winners to receive an invitation direct from me.

(All images taken from the Evernote homepage and Copyright 2008 Evernote.)

Photo by Edward Leger

A few months ago, I ran into some difficulty while neck deep in a particular writing project. My deadline was looming and I was going nowhere fast. Day after day I would sit down at the computer and beat my head against the wall, trying but repeatedly failing to drag forth the requisite pages that needed to be written that day.

It wasn’t due to a lack of organization. I had a detailed outline in front of me. The action and emotional impact in each chapter was scripted out and I even knew from which character’s viewpoint the scene would be written. I was excited about what was to come; the scenes were well constructed and drove the story forward at a decent pace, the characters were interesting and unusual. I was perhaps better prepared to write that book than any other I had written previously.

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