As I promised in the last post, this week's theme for Tutorial 'o the Day is RSS tips, tricks and hacks. If you don't know what RSS is, dig out from under that rock and get thee to a search engine.

Since most of these are one liners, we'll do two a day.

One of the frustrating things about RSS is that once you start using it you expect every site to offer feeds for every single chunk of data, which, unfortunately, few do. For instance, what if you want to get all of my colleague's posts and avoid me like the plague? There's no easy way to do that with the feeds that this page offers.

Here's a trick from [Micro Persuasion][3]'s Steve Rubel: search by byline and/or column title on Yahoo! News and then subscribe to the search as a feed. Every time your favorite writer has a new article published it'll show up in your feed. The only draw back being the slight lag time between when the article is published and when Yahoo News finds it, but hey, it's better than nothing.

The second tip for the day comes via the blog [Get Rich Slowly][2]. Thanks to [isnoop.net][1] it's easy to track your local movie listings even if the theaters near you don't have their own RSS feed. Just plug in your zip code and the scripts on isnoop will scrap Google to give you a list of theaters with movies, show times and an RSS feed for each. Combine those in your favorite RSS reader and you have an instant list of what's playing, where and when. 



[1]: http://isnoop.net/rss/theater.php "Theatre Search"
[2]: http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/01/14/custom-movie-listings-with-rss/ "Custom Movie Listings with RSS"
[3]: http://www.micropersuasion.com/ "Micro Persuasion"