RSS Awareness Day

Here's another blog post that doesn't really have all that much to do with Buddhism or Political Buddhism, but I felt like I should say something because I keep running into people who don't know what RSS is and don't use RSS readers, and it just happens to be "RSS Awareness Day!"

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.

The main benefit of RSS is that it enables people to stay connected with their favorite websites without having to visit them. Once you subscribe to a particular RSS feed, you will automatically receive updates from the website that publishes the feed, whenever they release new content.

You really don't need to be an uber-geek to use an RSS reader. Information on how is located here. It will literally take you less than 5 minutes to get started using one of the online readers they recommend. (I use Google Reader myself.) You might want to watch their video though (3m 45s) if you're totally unfamiliar with RSS.

So to try to tie this in to Buddhism somehow, RSS helps you save time while still allowing you to keep up with what's new on Access to Insight and lots of other sites, for example. Saving yourself time is good, because wasting time is bad, and you can spend the time you save on more important things like meditation.

Buddhism also recognizes that things are in a constant state of change. Accessing web sites manually all the time is an phenomena that is passing away. RSS is a phenomena that is arising. And as the Dhammapada says:

And better than a hundred years
lived without seeing
arising & passing away, is
one day
lived seeing
arising & passing away.
-Dhp 113

Well, that's the best I can come up with anyway.