RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” is one of the transformative Internet technologies of the 21st century, and if you use the World Wide Web (as you are now, reading this) you should consider making RSS a part of your routine. Before using RSS feeds, I had a collection of bookmarks for sites that I read regularly. I’d click on each one in turn to check if any new content had appeared since I last looked. If I was really bored, I might go through them a second time. This process was tedious and I often visited pages that were unchanged since my last visit.
That all changed when I started using RSS.
When you see a web site with that orange RSS logo on it, it means that the site has an RSS feed. The link to the First Bytes RSS feed is in the sidebar. Subscribe to the feed and you turn your relationship with the sites you follow upside down. Instead of visiting the site, site updates are delivered directly to you in your RSS reader. Often you can read entire articles right inside your RSS reader. RSS becomes your own personal, custom newspaper on your computer.
Your next question: what is an RSS reader? It is a program that checks the feeds you’re subscribed to and presents the new items. Recent web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera, all contain built in RSS readers, so you probably don’t need any additional software to try them out. Different RSS readers have different features, however, so you may want to try a couple to decide which works best for you.
If I can make a recommendation, my RSS reader of choice is Google Reader. Like most of Google’s applications, Google Reader is web based, so you don’t have to download anything, you just need a Google account and a web browser. One nice thing about Google reader is that you can pull up your RSS feeds from any computer; very useful if you want access to your subscriptions from both home and your office.
That’s it, RSS in a nutshell. Why don’t you get started with RSS right now by subscribing to First Bytes? If you already use an RSS reader, leave a comment telling us which RSS reader you prefer and why.
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