Wednesday, October 14, 2009

A Need to Feed.



Ok so here we are another great morning to be an student. Surviving is really difficult I find when you have no survival tools. So I am here to describe a great tool that some people might not know about it. It is called the RSS feed.

It is that little icon that to the right of my posts. Looks like 1/4 of three concentric circles. Yeah that is called an RSS Feed icon. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. Basically it is a subscription service. It allows users to subscribe to a website,blog, or really anywhere that offers information that is updated like videos, news, posts, articles, photos and stuff like that.

The reason this is so helpful to us as art students is that it puts the knowledge of experts and professionals right at our fingertips. If you are a user of iGoogle (which I highly recommend) then your RSS feeds will post directly to your homepage ready to view at anytime.  These are all automatically updated whenever the site adds content, which means that you don't have to go looking all over the net to find that Typography tutorial you saw or the really awesome free vector pack. It will all be cataloged right in your Feed Reader ready to go.

Subscribing to these feeds is as easy as clicking on the Feed Icon on the site. It may come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors but they all do the same thing. After you have clicked on it you then have to tell the feed where to go, kinda like your address on a magazine subscription. There are many places to put feeds. I already mentioned iGoogle but Windows LivemyYahoo and Newsgator all have Feed readers on them and they will help you tremendously.

I want to wrap up this Entry with a short list of some of the Feeds that I use and that have helped me to grow and keep up with all the craziness involved in surviving.

GoMediaZine - A great site that posts tutorials and articles that pertain to Graphic Design and illustration
Psdtuts+ - The Photoshop arm of the Tuts+ network of sites. They provide top notch tutorials from some the best in the industry.
Freelance Switch- Information on all of the ins and outs of freelancing
FreelanceFolder- Another great freelancing site. They literally wrote the book.\

Do any of you have any RSS feeds that you subscribe to? Let us know!

Survival is an option.

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