What is RSS

In a world heaving under the virtual weight of billions of web pages, keeping up with web sites can be a chore. RSS feeds let you keep up to date with the latest info on all your favorite sites without having to take the trouble to visit them. In effect, bits of their sites come to you instead.

You already know the web pages you like to visit – you probably have them in your browser's "Favorites". However, it is not easy to tell when they've been updated without visiting each one and checking. Computers, though, can tell when sites have been updated, using a feed.

An RSS feed is usually made up of a number of titles and short summaries of full content on the web site that produced the feed. In other words, you can quickly look at the summaries and, at a glance, tell if you want to click through and visit the full version on the web site. Plus, your computer will let you know when a new feed is available. And that's what an RSS feed is – a summary of the latest content on a web site so that you can see whether there is anything new or interesting available.

Although there is some debate about what RSS really stands for, the majority plump for Really Simple Syndication. Unlike some obscure technical terms: it's a simple web syndication format. RSS is also an international standard, and is rapidly growing in popularity. It used to be just technology and blog sites that offered it, but RSS is now becoming mainstream.

It is becoming more popular because it makes keeping up to date with the sites you like quick and easy.

What can I do with feeds?

So, once you've found one or more RSS feeds you want to subscribe to so you can keep up to date with their content, what’s next? What you need is a way of grouping your feeds together and displaying them so you can see them all in one place. There are several ways of doing this, which one you choose really depends on which you find easiest. All the different ways of using feeds usually offer some things in common:

a. a way of subscribing to feeds – pointing to the location, like a web site address,     where all the up-to-date feed content will be available
b. a way of displaying all the feeds you have subscribed to
c. a way of telling you which feeds have new content in them
d. a way of following links back to the full content on the web site

Lots of different companies offer separate downloadable programs (often called 'desktop readers') that will do most of the above and some web sites (often called 'web-based readers') and even some web browsers will read and present RSS feeds too.

How do I use feeds?

1. Choose (and install) a feed reader you want to use. You may need to set up a user account.

2. Surf the web, or use Feed Factory to find an RSS feed you are interested in subscribing to.

3. Subscribe to the feed - this works differently for different readers. You might be able to drag and drop the orange RSS button to your reader. Or another way is to copy the address of the feed from your browser's Address bar. Paste this into your reader. (You may need to set up a new feed (sometimes called a 'channel' first.) Most readers that are available will have specific help sections for their own products - refer to this is you get stuck.

4. Check your feed reader regularly to see if there is any new or interesting content.

5. When you find something you want to know more about click the link in the reader to go straight to the page in your browser.

6. And that's it! Of course, you can repeat the subscription step for all the other feeds you are interested in.

Listed below are some of the more popular RSS reader programs available to be downloaded.  

Awasu - (Windows)
BlogExpress - (Windows)
Bloglines - (Web based)
FeedReader - (Windows)
FeedDemon - (Windows)
SharpReader - (Windows)
SlashDock - (MacIntosh)
Lifera - (Linux)
NewsCrawler - (Windows)
NewsGator - (Windows)
NetNewsWire Lite - (MacIntosh)