When I accepted my son’s last-minute invitation to see the new summer blockbuster Inception on Sunday, I thought it would be a pleasant diversion. (Which it was, quite the brain thriller.) Little did I know it would hold something I’d want to share with you.
What the Heck is RSS?
And why would I care?
Good questions. First, here’s why RSS might interest you.
Unlike getting website updates or ezines by email, RSS gives you absolute, 100% complete control over the situation.
You don’t have to reveal your email address. If you want to stop receiving content, you don’t have to click the unsubscribe link or ask to be “taken off the list” (as easy as that is).
One click, and poof … the subscription is gone.
Pretty cool, huh?
That is cool! Umm … What the heck is RSS?
Alright! Now we’re ready to get to that part.
RSS is a simply an Internet technology standard that allows busy people to receive updates to web-based content of interest.
You might have figured that much out by now. But basically, that’s the essence of an RSS feed — you subscribe and then receive new content automatically in your feed reader.
If you actually want to know how RSS works, click here. Caution: it gets techie at that link.
What the heck is a feed reader?
You may already be using a form of feed reader, and not even know it. If you use personalized home page services like My Yahoo or My MSN, you’ve got RSS capabilities built in. That’s how syndicated content like news, weather and stock quotes appears on your personal page. You can also add content from any blog or other site that uses RSS to provide updates.
Other web-based tools are primarily dedicated to feed reading only. We like the free service Feedly for its beautiful presentation and simple-yet-powerful functionality. It’s best with the Firefox browser (which we also recommend).
If you do use Firefox, you can also get RSS feeds from your tool bar by using the Live Bookmarks function.
Finally, there are desktop-based feed readers. These function somewhat like an email program for feeds. Examples include Newsgator and Feed Demon.
If it sounds complicated, it’s really not.
Sounds good. So how do I subscribe to a Feed?
First of all, look for the subscription or feed options. You might see a variety of buttons (amusingly called chicklets).
If the site you want to subscribe to uses FeedBurner to aid in the subscription process (like this site and many others), you’ll likely see the standard RSS icon, which takes you to a page that will give you an array of the most popular feed readers so you can select yours, and you’ll go from there. This is the new standard RSS icon:
Sometimes there will be a chicklet for your particular reader right on the blog that will take you to the appropriate subscription page. You may see these (among others):
Finally, you may also see little orange buttons that say XML or RSS. Often these chicklets will take you to a page that looks like code gibberish. In this case, you simply cut and paste the page URL from your browser window and manually paste it into your feed reader subscription function.
Hopefully this last method will soon disappear, never to be seen again.
In summary: RSS makes it really easy to get the news you want.
So there you have it. RSS is being adopted at a phenomenal rate, because it’s a good thing for everyone.
The benefit to readers is obvious. And it’s good for publishers too, because we want to make sure that people feel comfortable subscribing, and that our message is not zapped by an overzealous spam filter.
If there’s anything here that is confusing, or you have a question, please contact us and we’ll be happy to lend a hand!
And if after all of that you’d rather have the convenience of getting news from us by email, click here to go the subscription page. We promise to treat you right.
Thanks to Copyblogger for a helping hand with this tutorial.
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