What is RSS ?
Instead of going out to your favorite news sites and blogs to see if they have new content you want to read, how would you like to have them send their news to you? That’s the concept behind RSS and it’s changing the way people use the web.
What is an RSS Feed exactly?
An RSS feed is a text file (in XML format) on someone’s website that gets updated automatically when content is published on their site. An RSS reader simply keeps track of which ‘Feeds’ you want to read and goes out and grabs whatever is new when it starts.
What does the actual RSS feed look like
When you click on the RSS icon on a site ( 
) it’ll either bring you to a list of feeds to choose from or an actual RSS feed. The feed can look different on different web browsers.
An RSS feed in Firefox
FireFox has a feature called Live Bookmarks which lets you see a list of the latest articles of a feed in your bookmarks pulldown menu. This was kind of cool but still requires you to go to the site to read the news, which kind of defeats the purpose. There are also extensions a
An RSS feed in Opera
Opera has a built in RSS reader, so when you get to a feed it asks you if you want to add the feed to your feed menu.
An RSS feed in Safari
Safari has a built in RSS reader so when you get to a feed it brings you into the reader automatically.
A Feedburner RSS feed in any Browser
Feedburner is a statistics service for feeds which a lot of people use to keep track of how many readers they have. Another perk of using it is that it gives users subscribe links for some of the popular online readers
How do I subscribe to an RSS feed
You’re probably here because you saw these subscribe buttons on a blog. These are links that subscribe you to the blog you are reading with an RSS Feed Reader. If you already use an RSS reader and there is an icon for your reader you can just click it to subscribe to the site’s feed, but chances are, if you’re reading this, you don’t know what an RSS Reader is, so … read on …
How do I pick a Reader to use
There are so many of them out there, you should try more than one so you get a feel for what is available. Personally we like google reader for an online reader. The good thing about using an online reader is that when you’re away from your computer you can access your news from any web browser. If you use the same computer every day, the web based readers might not be as convenient as a program on your computer. If you use a mac and have the latest version of OSX (10.5 Leopard), you can add RSS feeds directly into mac mail, which makes it so you don’t even need to launch a browser.
