Who has time to visit dozens of websites every day to check on the latest articles that interest you? Fortunately, with RSS, you don’t have to. RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication. By signing up to receive the RSS feed from a website, when new content from that website is produced, it will be delivered directly to you.
There are two main ways to read RSS feeds. The first way is via email. Some sites allow you sign up have notifications of new content sent to your email inbox. Just provide your email address, and the site will take care of the rest. This is the best option for those who only want to receive a couple feeds.
The second way is using a feed reader. Feed readers (sometimes called a feed aggregator) collect all of your feeds and present the information to you in a newspaper-like format. Feed readers let you organize your feeds by subjects, search by keywords, star items for reference, or clip articles for storage. Feed readers are the best solution for those managing multiple feeds, someone doing research or producing a blog, or just information junkies.
Feed readers can be plugins to web mail like Gmail or Yahoo, or web browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer. There are also free stand-alone feed readers such as FeedDemon. CNET has an article on how to choose the best feed reader for you.
Once you’ve decided how you want to read an RSS feed, all you have to do is sign up. Go to your favorite website, look for an orange icon on the website that looks like the image on the left. Click the icon and follow the directions.
