RSS Explained

What is RSS?

RSS (Rich Site Summary or Real Simple Syndication) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. When content is added to the website, it is automatically added to the RSS Feed, and as such, sent out to all subscribers of the RSS Feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article.

How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use. Most modern browsers include a feed reader, but a variety of RSS Readers are available. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). Outlook itself can also be used to subscribe to RSS Feeds. There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers.

Once you have your Feed Reader of choice in place, it is a matter of finding sites the content that you would like to subscribe to and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.