Wednesday, October 31, 2007

What the heck is RSS?

The most simple answer is that RSS is a technology that allows you to keep up with what’s happening on your favorite website without actually visiting and reading that website everyday (or 10 times a day.)

It used to be that if you liked a particular website you “bookmarked” it or put it in your “favorites”. That made it easier for you to quickly visit that site again, without having to manually type in the site’s address. How quaint.

Now all you have to do is open a free RSS feedreader account (Google Reader, for example.) You give it a list of your favorite sites you want to keep track of and you get notified everytime one of them updates. All you have to do is check your Reader account every once in a while. It’s as easy as checking your email (and no mail to answer.)

More and more websites (especially blogs) are offering RSS feed subscriptions. It’s easy to subscribe to them. They’ll love you for it too, because bloggers really like to have regular readers. So look for the (usually) orange RSS feed link and click on it if you find the site interesting and want to be kept up-to-date.

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