Today I started thinking about all of the great resources I’d found about XNA recently. As I’m sure someone else thought some time ago, “Wouldn’t it be great if I had some way to keep up with all of this in a single, central locations, so I didn’t have to check 20 sites? … Hey, what was that RSS thing I remember hearing about?”
Yeah, so once again, I’m a bit behind the times, technologically. That makes me a bit sad, being a computer science major, but hey, I’m getting there.
For any that may not know, RSS is a way to subscribe to websites, and receive updates in something resembling an email inbox. Rather than having to go out to all of the sites you’re interested in, you check the one place, and see everything new. Overall, it’s a really cool concept. I subscribed to the blogs of all of the Microsoft developers on the XNA team, as well as a number of others I found via XNA Wiki.
Granted, I haven’t tried any other tool for this, but Google Reader has been a pleasant experience so far. It’s web based, just like GMail, so I can access it anywhere I have a browser and an internet connection. It took a little browsing in the help to figure out how to sort everything into folders, but that’s worked out well. I’ve got a folder for Microsoft Devs in general, the XNA team, general XNA blogs, general game development blogs, and I went ahead and threw in two World of Warcraft news sites so I had a little less to keep up with every day.
If you haven’t given Google Reader a try, I highly recommend it. Of course, I’ll keep my eyes open for anything better, but at the moment I see no real reason to change.
More importantly though, if you haven’t tried RSS at all, you really should. Remember, just because you can get by with things now doesn’t make it useless. I think most people would agree that adding extra time to the day would be useful. While Google can’t help you do that (yet), you can get the same effect by taking the things you already do and being more efficient. Or, if you’re like me, and don’t pay attention to blogs, perhaps it’d be a good time to start. Once you see how easy it is and how much useful information you can have sent directly to you, I nearly guarantee you’ll find plenty of ways to use it. 
