Palm and Treo Hacks

Read Syndicated Content

Have a favorite RSS feed? Wish you could read it on the move with your PDA? There are several RSS readers available for Palm devices.

On the desktop, RSS readers can take many forms. One of the simplest is the Live Bookmark capability in Firefox. This function creates a bookmark folder from an RSS feed. The folder contains one linkfor each item in the feed. You can see the name of the link but no description or metadata.

What Is RSS?

RSS is a technology for letting users know about new posts or articles on a web site. An RSS feed returns a list of articles (or posts or headlines) with descriptions and links.

The technology first became popular as a way of staying up-to-date with blogs. As it became more widely used for blogs, news sites adopted it. Now, you can find aggregators (such as Bloglines, http://www.bloglines.com/) that collect RSS feeds from multiple sites and even search engines that return results as RSS feeds.

The basic idea is simple. To produce an RSS feed, a web site produces a specially-formatted XML page. For each item (news headline, blog, post, or article), the XML page provides a name, a linkand a description. Some forms of RSS can also include metadata such as author and date. RSS is standard—so standard that you get five different versions to choose from. Yay us. The two most common formats are RDF, which provides better metadata support, and RSS 2.0, which is a simpler format (but which also has the necessary support for podcasting).