This is going to be another two-parter. In the first part I’ll explain what RSS is and why it makes your life easier.
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. Don’t worry if that doesn’t mean anything to you. It’s basically a way for a website to deliver content straight to its readers instead of making them come to the site to check for something new. Kind of like an email newsletter, except you read it in your web browser or another piece of software, called a news reader or feed aggregator.
Here’s an excellent video summary:
Why do I want to use this?
This means you can keep up with changes and new content on your favorite websites and blogs without actually visiting the page to check if something new has been posted. This is good for quickly skimming new headlines from sites that update frequently, and usually they include a short summary so you can tell whether you are interested in the full article before you open it.
It’s also useful for following sites that don’t update frequently without wasting time visiting the page. Just subscribe and forget about it until your feed reader tells you there’s something new. It’s a good way to keep track of those sites you might forget about otherwise.
Some blogs include the full content of their posts in their feeds, which means that unless you want to comment, you don’t even have to visit the site to see the new content. And speaking of comments, some blogs offer RSS feeds for those too, so you can keep tabs on a discussion without visiting the page a dozen times just to see nothing new has been added.
Cool. How do I get it?
You need two things. The first is the address of an RSS feed, the second is software to read the feed in.
To get the address of an RSS feed, you need to visit a site that has one. Most of them do. (We’ll use the Writech blog as an example, and you can test it out.) Look for an icon like this:
That’s the universal RSS symbol. You’ll probably see it somewhere on the page, usually on the sidebar, header, or footer. You may also see it in the address bar, to the right of the URL. Most of the time, it’s as simple as clicking on the icon and letting your browser do the rest. Go ahead, try clicking on that icon. (It’s the feed for this blog.)
If your browser doesn’t know what to do, you can get the address in a few different ways.
If the icon appears on the page, you can click on it and then copy the contents of the address bar. You can also right click on it and choose the option that will let you copy the link address or location.
Sometimes you’ll see the RSS icon in the address bar, but you don’t see a link on the page. This means your browser found a feed for the site, even though they don’t announce it on the page. This is pretty common with some blog services. Just click on the RSS icon and it should take you to the feed page, where you can copy the URL in the address bar.
It’s better to use the address from icons that appear on the page, rather than the address bar, if you have both options. This is because many sites will use a third party service like Feedburner to produce their feeds. If they change their web address, they can also change Feedburner to reflect that and you will continue to receive updates without having to find the new address and subscribe again.
Next you need something to read your feeds in. Most browsers have an RSS reader built in these days, which makes it easy to subscribe to feeds. (And they even automatically detect if a feed is present.)
In my browser, Opera, whenever I click on an RSS icon, it takes me to a page that has a subscribe button. After I subscribe, I can check the site from the “Feeds” menu of my toolbar.
For Firefox users, your browser also has RSS functionality built in, but they call it “Live Bookmarks”. Mozilla has an excellent guide to using Live Bookmarks and if you need something with more features, there are lots of Firefox plugins to choose from.
Google has a web-based news reader called Google Reader. If you already have a Gmail or Google account, you can use that to sign in and get started. Andy Wibbles has a great introductory video on using Google Reader.
Now you can read the new content from all the sites you visit regularly in one place. Next time, I’ll explain why you should have RSS feeds for your website and some tools to help you manage them.
