A Guide to RSS: How to Subscribe to Your Favorite Content Sites

RSS has become a favorite word bantered about the internet, but not a lot of people understand what it is. Simply, put, RSS is a program that lets you view content on the web and on people's blogs without having to navigate there manually. This is known as "Really Simple Syndication". With the assistance of an RSS feeder on your system, all you need to do is subscribe to your favorite content sites that have RSS enabled; this is called an RSS feed. Don't get lost by the term-it's just a way to subscribe to your favorite web content (usually in the form of a blog or other site that provides news.) A news site might put their latest news articles into their feed whenever the publish a new article. A blog, on the other hand, would offer its recent posts as RSS feed.

Feeds are issued by literally thousands of publishers, everywhere from individual people to well-known business organizations. An RSS feed helps to bring the site's most current content to you in a way that is quickly received and read; moreover, it means you don't have to continually visit each and every site every day to get the info you want. An RSS or "feed reader" normally accomplishes this.

Feed readers are also software you can run on your computer. They help you subscribe to your chosen feeds and read through them faster than you would on your own. Some readers are simple and to the point, just giving you the headlines. Others will operate inside your browser to make the content look similar to a source page. Once you've found a reader that you like, just click or drag it from your browser to use it. Sites with RSS feeds will normally have a button just for that reason.

There are many different RSS feed formats, as well as one that works slightly differently, simply called "Atom". Atom has become particularly popular with many in the blogging community. Luckily, many RSS readers can read both.. Other terms to be aware of are XML, or "extensible markup language", which is the code for text feeds. Also, an "OPML" file indexes feed lists. Most people don't have to worry about these terms, though-just RSS and Atom.

An RSS feed helps you stay current with topics you care about. If you're not sure what kind of information is available, check out the feed libraries online to help point you in the right direction. Google and Yahoo also have readers that make subscribing a snap. Firefox users have made an add-on that will aggregate RSS feeds, and will save RSS feeds as bookmarks that will constantly update using RSS feed. If you don't want to go that route, there are plenty of stand-alone readers that will suit your needs.

RSS is a recent advancement towards using the internet to its fullest potential. Just try not to clog your email box with so much information you end up ignoring it. To avoid this, places like Feedster will search through the thousands of RSS feeds on the internet to pick up only the news that interests you. It isn't always 100% accurate, so use it carefully.