Gmail Webclips

Boy is RSS getting more popular by the minute. Sometimes you don’t even notice that it’s RSS you’re working with. RSS is, of course, really simple syndication, or a stripped-down machine-readable version of a website or any other content that is usually in XML format and retrieved by software in order to present summary information to users.

Short of using a full-fledged RSS reader, you can actually get alerts from your favorite on your browser via Gmail. And this is through the webclips that appear right on top of your message thread view.

You can control the content that appears on your webclips by going to the webclips tab under Gmail settings.

Gmail will present a list of existing clips and you can take these out by clicking on the remove link.

If you would like to add new sources for webclips, there are two options. First, you can search for keywords or topics and Google will give you a choice of sites that appear on Google search as having those relevant keywords and RSS feeds. Second, you can directly input the URL of the RSS feed and Google will determine if it’s possible to get content from that feed.

When you search by keyword, you can add webclip sources by clicking the add button beside the result.

You can also directly key in the URL of the RSS feed. Just be sure you’re inputting it correctly. If it’s a blog, it usually has a /feed, .XML or .RDF extension.

You can then view a sample of entries from that particular feed, just to check if you got it right.

When you’re through adding new topics or removing unwanted ones, just click save, and you will then have those new sites as sources of feeds.

You can actually browse for pre-set topics at the left column, ranging from news, business, lifestyle, tech, sports and others. Then again, if you don’t want to see any webclips on your message views, just uncheck the “Show my web clips above the Inbox” box above.