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RSS Feeds

What Is RSS?

In a nutshell: Usually when you want to find stuff on the Internet, you have navigate to other websites to find it. RSS brings the web to you.

Here's a great analogy from Ed Lee:

Your Web content is like water in a lake. Lots of people want it and you want them to have it. They want to drink it, swim in it and play water polo in it.
But, to get it, they need to visit the lake, fill their buckets and then go back to their homes to use it.
RSS enables your audience to create a stream from your lake (where the content is) to their home (where they need the content).

RSS is a format for sharing content online. It started out as a way to distribute news-related headlines and descriptions.

RSS allows you to subscribe to information that gets delivered directly to your RSS reader or Web browser. So instead of visiting several different web pages each day or performing the same web searches over and over, you can set up RSS feeds to do it for you.

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary.

How Does RSS Work?

Subscribing to an RSS feed is really easy. There are three simple steps:

  1. Select a reader.
  2. Find a feed.
  3. Add it to your reader.

Here's a great video that explains RSS feeds in plain language.


RSS Readers

Web-Based Readers:
Bloglines
Google Reader
NetVibes
PageFlakes


Stand-Alone Readers:
FeedDemon (Windows)
NetNewsWire (Mac)
NewsGator
SharpReader (Windows)

Find A Feed

Find a link to an RSS on the site you want to receive content from automatically. Sites often draw attention to RSS feeds using one of these images:
RSS Icon RSS Icon XML Icon

Many news sites have a dedicated page listing their RSS feeds on different topics (news, sport, business, etc). If you can't find a link to an RSS feed on the page you're on, see if they have a dedicated page.

When you click on the link, some feeds will offer you a list of ways to subscribe to the feed. If you use one of the ways listed, you can easily subscribe to the feed by following the prompts on-screen. Otherwise, or if the feed doesn't offer these options, just copy the address in your browser's address bar and follow the instructions for your RSS reader.


Latest page update: made by davefleet , Mar 1 2008, 10:51 AM EST (about this update About This Update davefleet Added simple analogy for RSS - davefleet

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