I’ve been watching the MCS feed for the last month or so, and it’s hovering right around 3,000 subscribers, but never really stays above that particular threshold.
Here’s the regular RSS Feed:
Here’s the NSFW RSS Feed:
I used to use bloglines, but due to some feeds not updating and not liking their lack of updates, I’ve moved over to google reader. I do enjoy having just a single site to go to for all my websurfing, and it’s changed the way that I interact with the net in a fundamental way.
I’m often surprised that not everyone on the net uses RSS. WTF yo. I do thank you though, cause you’re the people that are keeping MCS up and running!
i use akregator for RSS, because i can. too bad you people who use mac or windoesn’t can’t use akregator…
ok. pardon my stupid, but whats RSS? I’ve heard it mentioned here and on some of the other sites i visit and i have no idea what it means. this post makes me think its important though
here, let me google that for you…
ok… that didn’t really help much at all…
now i know what it stands for and a little bit of how the word came to be. Which doesn’t really explain what it is. Clicking on tiki’s RSS links makes it seem like its a retarded version of the actual website where you have to click through to see the pictures. Why would anyone want to use that? it seems a lot simpler to just go to the actual website.
I’m not trying to be stupid, really, i’m just really really bad with computertalk
Ah, see, you are trying to use an HTML reader (i.e. webbrowser) instead of an RSS reader.
But I agree about the desktop thing.
I use BeyondPod on my new Android smartphone to keep track of and download daily and weekly podcasts and vids. It’s very handy there.
But generally I just check frequently updated sites by going directly to the webpage and checking.
(RSS is also the technology that keeps track of when the blogs I follow get updated on in the little window on my blog, but that’s all under-the-hood. I guess I could add McS’s RSS feed to it, but this site gets updated so often I don’t see the point.)
RSS:
The website supplies a feed file that anyone can load up. Some sites put their full content into this feed, others just put an excerpt. MCS puts the full content in there, so you’ll see the image and whatever nonesense the poster types in.
Then, you can use any program you want to load this feed up to see if there’s anything new on the site. I personally like using a webbased one so that there isn’t anything that’s pushed through without my aggregator grabbing it. RSS feeds generally save a ton of bandwidth and time, both for the websites and the site visitors, because some aggregators cache the content and images.
If you want to see the comments on the post, or to see the full size image, you can click through.
So, I have like 2,000 sites that I want to know if they have updated content on. Instead of opening up all 2,000 sites, I load up google reader and see a list of all the updated content for all of the sites.
Another good use of RSS is that other people can embed a list of the most recent posts on MCS, which is one reason that images are watermarked 😉
This is what my google reader rss feeds look like. On the left are the various feeds I’ve subscribed to and on the right, individual items (MCS Forums in this case).
www.imageleech.net/data/media/1/rss.png
It allows me to view all the new comments w/out having to go to the forums and figure out which threads have been updated. It does the same for the main site. It tells me what new pics have posted and also all the new comments. It’s a big deal if you want to keep track of all comments, even the ones on older posts.
Oh and you can see the pics from the feed itself, w/o going to mcs itself.
www.imageleech.net/data/media/1/rss_pic.png
Folders!?! Somehow I’ve missed the fact that Google reader allows folders. Thank you for posting that pic!
I couldn’t function w/o reader and I couldn’t function w/in the reader w/o folders. I’m sure I have hundreds of subscriptions, maybe even more than one thousand. I also set it to show only updated, otherwise I’d be doing a lot of scrolling.
I hope Tiki’s explanation helped you, it basically brings the updates to you (or notification of updates) instead of you surfing to all your bookmarked sites and checking if they have updates.
One the one side it’s great for sites that update very infrequently, so you don’t have to check the site daily and it’s also great for sites that update very frequently (like mcs) because you can be sure you don’t miss anything. Hope this helped.
i just subscribed now that you said that rss keeps mcs alive.
i use google reader, for what it’s worth.
I couldn’t function on MCS w/o rss feeds, let alone the rest of the internet.
I’m still on Bloglines. Can’t stand Google Reader. I’m hoping that Ask finally sells it to somebody who actually starts caring about it and getting the shit that’s happened working again. 1,313 feeds, so yes, I use the hell out of it. I do use Google Reader for Craigslist, as it seems that Craigslist has just banned Bloglines (but they sure as hell aren’t going to ban Google…) And last year the hurricane updates weren’t happening, although they are now this year. And it still goes down. And sending them anything doesn’t even get a robot email back, it’s just a black hole. If I could stand GR just a little better.
And yeah, I’m like nyokki, if I didn’t have it, I’d be going nuts.
I didn’t like how you would lose all the posts if you opened up one feed and your browser crashed or your power went out. I tried out beta.bloglines.com for a while, and loved it, until I realized that all of the livejournal feeds were blocked 🙁
Yeah, that could be problematic. 99% of the time that happened, it was due to their side, not my side. Then again, I have a UPS on my computer. 🙂 You used to be able to view the last session with a button click, which sort of worked (I tended to get more than that, but I guess it was better than not getting it all), but that went away. When I get the error about a misconfiguration, it actually doesn’t lose them (which seems to be a time out issue on their SQL). Now when it blanks the frame, and nothing (much) happens, it’s gone.
I knew some LiveJournal feeds weren’t working, I didn’t realize that it was all of them. And who knows, LJ might not be blocking them, it might be something that’s fallen over on their side. I’ve seen that often enough.
All the original developers are on #bloglines in Effnet. Which I only found out through @Bloglines on Twitter, which isn’t even an official account, and after the last blow up a few months ago, whoever was running that has simply quit doing anything with that account.