What the heck is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a way of syndicating (sharing of content among different web sites) information of all sorts. This information can be news feeds (like CNN or CBS News) or can be from a personal blog (like this one). The language used to create RSS Feeds is called XML.
So what? Well, here’s how RSS can help you….
Understanding a little about RSS and XML allows you to subscribe to different news feeds. It allows you to literally design your own daily news choices.
For example, let’s say you just want to get the men’s basketball news. You can go and sign up for a news feed just for Yahoo’s Men’s College Basketball feed. And then you’ll be kept up to date on the college basketball scene automatically.
Now clicking that link won’t do you any good UNLESS you have a news reader.
A news reader is needed to decipher the XML language that the RSS news feed was generated. News Readers are designed to every once in a while (you determine the frequency) check ALL of your news feeds that you signed up for (you can sign up for tons if you wanted).
Once it checks them all, any updated news feeds are then displayed as headlines in the your news reader. You can then choose to read either the entire article or pass based on the headline or your interest or time.
Using news readers is a great way to keep updated and keep in touch with the websites you really enjoyed. Good RSS feeds will continually show you new and interesting things.
Here’s the step by step…
1) Get a news reader. There are many readers, most are FREE. You can get a desktop news reader (like Feed Reader) or you can go with an online reader (like MyYahoo, or Google Reader or Bloglines).
2) Go to a website that has a news feed or an RSS feed. Often times they’ll display some symbols like…
or 
or the new 
3) Clicking on that symbol will only get you gibberish (or XML language). What you’ll need to do is to copy that feed code (http:// code in your address bar if you clicked on it OR just right click on the orange button and copy the link code) and then put it in your news reader. Typically there will be an option to ‘Add a new feed’ in your reader. Just paste that feed code into your news reader. You’ll then begin getting all the news feeds from that site.
4) You can add as many news feeds as you have time for. You can always delete them if you don’t have time or if they aren’t very good feeds.
5) News feeds are helpful in that they don’t get blocked by SPAM filters and you don’t have to give away any personal information (like email address) to sign up for a news feed. It puts you in charge of what you’d like to receive.
It’s been suggested that only about 15% of the population actually have news readers. But, with the release of the new Windows coming out soon, it will supposedly have a built in news reader and the popularity of news feeds will probably increase dramatically.
If you haven’t already, try out a news reader and sign up for some news feeds.
Our news feed is at the bottom of this page (the little RSS link in the blue bar). Design Your Own Web Newsfeed.
Until the next ‘What the heck??‘….see you then!