As RSS publishing feeds have become more prevalent on the Web, I've changed my information-gathering habits to take advantage of the power and time-savings of RSS readers. I almost never "surf" the web any more. When I want to catch up on all my usual information sources, I use my RSS reader to see what's new. One-stop shopping for pretty much everything. I even find myself shunning sites that don't have an RSS feed, because I don't want to be bothered with "going to them" just to see whether there's anything new for me there. How quickly things change, eh?

Because my preferred browser is FireFox, I've personally settled on the Sage plug-in as my favorite RSS reader, but there are many excellent ones out there. (BTW, Kathy Scanlon's blog has a good link for finding RSS readers in her About RSS feeds article.) Sage has no problems with pass-through authentication, so it will display even the company-private information in the RSS feed from the my subscriptions page on the iMIS Communities site. This makes it very easy to stay on top of new content of any sort that is tagged for the projects on which I'm working.

If you haven't yet discovered the RSS feed on the my subscriptions page, it's the XML button at the very bottom of the page.

All categories to which you are subscribed will be in the feed. If you have subscribed to many categories, you should probably check the feed often, because at the time I'm writing this blog entry, the feed seems limited to 10 items at a time.