How RSS can help you

What's RSS? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (sometimes, anyway). An RSS file feed is a file that you can find on many websites, like news websites and blogs. When you subscribe to it, you can read the latest news or blog posts without having to visit that particular website.

You may notice the orange icon to the right of this page that says "Subscribe". If you clicked on it, you would go to a page that shows the contents of the feed (my blog posts) and with links to help you subscribe. To subscribe to my RSS feed, you would need a program called an RSS aggregator, or RSS reader. You may have one built into the web browser you are using, or you can use an online RSS reader like Google Reader. I currently use an RSS reader built into my browser, as well as a nifty program called Feed Reader.

Once you have an RSS reader, it's very simple. You usually just have to click on a link to subscribe (you can find them on many websites if you look closely; they often say RSS or XML) and your feed reader will automatically subscribe to the feed. Then it will update the feeds periodically to give you the latest news.

What if you click on the link and you get a bunch of weird computer code? That's the code of the feed, which doesn't really matter to you, most likely. Your feed reader will probably let you copy and paste the address of your feed.

For more on RSS and a perhaps simpler explanation (I probably lost you, didn't I?), go to http://computer.howstuffworks.com/rss.htm.