WHAT IS RSS?
What does RSS stand for? Well, it's up in the air. Some say it means "Rich Site Summary," and others say it means "Really Simple Syndication." Guess which ones are the engineers.
Fortunately, none of this matters unless you have a really up-to-date version of Trivial Pursuit. All you need to know about RSS is that it's a simple way to deliver headlines from a number of sites into one central location. You can combine news, blogs, photos and even personal alerts into one place, and it's spam-proof since you don't give your personal information to anyone. You want to stop receiving the updates? Just delete the feed.
Suppose you have 50 sites and blogs that you like to visit regularly. Going to visit each website and blog every day could take you hours. With RSS, you can "subscribe" to a website or blog, and get "fed" all the new headlines from all of these 50 sites and blogs in one list, and see what's going on in minutes instead of hours.
SUBSCRIBING TO FEEDS
In order to subscribe to an RSS feed, you must have an RSS reader. Once you have that, just click on the "RSS" button, or look for the orange RSS feed icon that you see to the right. If everything is set up correctly, the feed will be added to your RSS reader and new headlines will be delivered to you every time they are updated so that you can read or skim them on your own time.
RSS READERS
There are a number of RSS readers out there – some online, some individual programs, and some plugins to existing programs. Which version you use is dependent on what works best for you. Also, most browsers now support what is referred to as "live bookmarks" which allow you to pull down a list of updated headlines from the bookmark bar in your browser. If you only subscribe to a few, this might be the easiest solution for you.
