What is RSS or ‘news feeds’?
Posted February 7th, 2008 | No Comments
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. They are also often described as ‘News Feeds’.
RSS Feeds are most often used on sites with regularly updated content, for example a blog or a news site. Put simply, it is a way of ‘subscribing’ to a websites content. The main benefit of this is that you are notified when a website is updated without having to keep visiting the site. You can also browse the content of numerous sites all from one application, an RSS Reader.
RSS Reader?
There are many different RSS Feed readers around with a huge difference in the features. Once you are more experienced with RSS feel free to try some of the more advanced readers, to start with I recommend Google Reader as it’s simple and web based so you don’t have to install anything.
Subscribe
Once you have set up Google Reader you can begin subscribing to RSS feeds. To do this, look for the little RSS icon (it’s usually orange but can be any colour). If you are using Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer 7+ you will see the icon in the address bar at the top of your browser. If you don’t there should also be a text link to the feed somewhere on the page. Once you have found this click on it and select Google Reader (or whichever reader you installed) as your default reader. Then any time you click an RSS feed icon or link you will be subscribed to the content from that site.
When you login to your RSS Reader you will see each site that you have subscribed too, clicking on that sites name will bring up a list of posts from the site in chronological order, they will most likely be bolded. When you have read the post, the bold is removed, much like email. You can then move on to the next site and read the content from that without actually visiting any of the websites.