RSS feeds can make your online life more rewarding. With everything we have to do in this world we don’t have a lot of time left over to peruse our favorite websites, blogs, shopping sites and on and on. Don’t you wish there was a way your favorite sites could just send you their stories as they’re posted? There is! And it has a lovely acronym: RSS feed.



The Tech World According to Oprah
If you’re a techie, which I am guessing you’re not, you know the technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication” which is an XML format that was created to syndicate news and serve as way to share web content.

For people who don’t spend 80% of their time on the web, Oprah or someone equally as clever, re-defined RSS perfectly: “Ready for Some Stories”. It’s a way you can get the latest stories, posts or product information, in one place, from your favorite websites and blogs, whenever you go online. Nifty.

So let’s say you look at 25 websites and blogs on a pretty regular basis. Hitting each website and blog daily could take hours. With an RSS feed you can “subscribe” to a website or blog, and get “fed” the newest story headlines or posts from all your favorite web hangouts in one place. It’s kind of like the malt shop after school with your friends or in my case smoking in the baseball dugout between classes – hey, it was high school.

Okay, you know all your websites and blogs but where are they gonna hang out (dugouts are cold and not recommended)? Well there’s warm, comfy place called The RSS reader, where your RSS list is created and housed. The Reader collects the headlines from all the websites and blogs you subscribe to.



Gettin’ the Juice AKA Subscribing to RSS feeds
Now that you decided the whole RSS feed thing sounds like a good idea you have to “subscribe” to your fave website and blog RSS feeds, which is basically telling them “Hell yeah I want your headlines”. It’s just like subscribing to a magazine or newsletter only there’s no paper or emails, just the headlines sent to The Reader. If the headline peaks your interest just click on the headline and you’ll get the entire story.

To start getting your feeds all you have to do click on an RSS symbol (examples below) or the text link with the words “Subscribe to our RSS feed” on the website or blog. The RSS symbols or text links are usually pretty easy to spot though can occasionally be elusive. The most common places to find them are in the perimeter of the website or blog; top, bottom or sides. Since the authors of websites and blogs want you to subscribe to their sites they make RSS feeds relatively simple (no pun intended) to find.

Examples of RSS feed symbols.

The Readers
Because operating systems and browsers are all a little different PC vs. Mac and Firefox, Internet Explorer, AOL and so on, how to get an RSS reader will rely on what browser you use and how easily you want get your RSS list.

Now, there are different RSS feeds 1.0, 2.0 etc. but from me to you – just look for one of the snappy RSS symbols and you should be fine

If you want to get your RSS list on any computer or on the run with a mobile device i.e. PDA, laptop, or cell phone, some of the most common, free, and popular RSS readers are:
MyYahoo
MyMSN
MyAOL
MyGoogle

There are a lot of choices and they’re all good RSS readers, so you can pick the style you like the best and RSS to your heart’s content.



Bookmarks and RSS
There are some browsers, like Safari and Firefox, that will let you to subscribe to RSS feeds through the browser and it’s called “live bookmarking”. But, you can only do it on Internet Explorer if you have IE7 which is still in Beta. In other words, non-geeks are probably not bookmarking in Internet Explorer because it’s not very common. Also, you can only get the RSS feeds from the computer you set them up on. So if you want to get your feeds easily and from most computers stick to RSS Readers. Now that you are an RSS expert go forth and subscribe!