This is the second edition in a series highlighting the tools and capabilities that set OPIEWeb’s Q&A section apart from listservs and regular discussion boards. To see the complete series of Feature Spotlight articles, click here. – RA

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. That meaningless description aside, RSS is really useful, and our site makes judicious use of it. What it essentially boils down to is that OPIEWeb (and OPIEBlog too) are constantly updating these descriptive lists, which can be read by desktop programs like Microsoft Outlook 2007, FeedReader, or Web-based readers like Google Reader, and many, many (many) more. By subscribing to one of these lists, you get email-like notifications whenever something new is added.

Lets say, for example, that you are a stats geek. Stop protesting, there is nothing wrong with being a stats geek. I’m married to one. Now, as a stats geek you would be really interested in making sure that people know how to plot an ANOVA in SPSS using just syntax, understand centering (not that kind of centering, the kind where you readjust your dataset to… never mind), etc. So you subscribe to the RSS feed (thats what we call the lists in the computer geek world by the way) for the SPSS or statistics or ANOVA tags using, say, Outlook. Now, whenever someone posts a new answer with one of those tags, Outlook will let you know about it.

OPIEWeb has separate RSS feeds for every single tag. Even if you just created a new question that has a tag no one else has used before, that new tag has its own feed. So does your question for that matter. You can subscribe to a question and be alerted whenever a new answer or comment is posted on it. You can even subscribe to the entire list of questions so whenever a new one is added, you are the first to know. Okay, among the first to know. There is also a separate feed for every registered user. so if you’re as obsessive about reputation points and badges as I am, you can track that too.

Subscribing to an RSS feed is like subscribing to a newspaper, only there is no paper boy to tip and if you want to cancel, no one will pressure you to re-subscribe. We don’t even charge extra for Sundays. The processes varies slightly depending on which reader you use, but in general, you click some button to add a new feed. You enter the url of the feed, the software will attempt to read the feed, then you given some additional options on notifications and display and you’re done. To get the blog feed, the url is http://opieblog.opieweb.com/feed/. For the 30 newest questions in all tags, use http://opieweb.com/feeds. For users feeds or specific tags, you will need to see a link in the bottom right corner of their pages for finding the feed as these are generated by the system.

So, thats the spotlight on RSS. Subscribing to our many, many (many) feeds isn’t necessary in order to enjoy OPIEWeb (or OPIE Blog), but its nice to know they are there. You could of course, just visit the site every day.