What is RSS and How Do I Use It?

RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a way to have information delivered to you. instead of you having to go find it.

If you’re visiting websites and blogs to see if there is anything new to read, you’re probably wasting a lot of time and not always finding anything new. RSS allows you to subscribe to a blog or website and have any new published information sent to you so you don’t have to go looking for it. For instance, if you sign up for the Blogging Basics 101 feed, then every time I publish a new article you’ll receive it in your feed reader. A feed reader gathers all of your feeds in one place so they’re easy to manage.

 How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed

1. Install a feed reader (see the list of links below).
2. Go to a site you want to get updates from and click the button that looks like this:

You may get a page that asks if you want to add the feed to your feed reader. Yep, you do.

Here’s a list of places you can find feed readers to install.

• Lifehacker has a list of good feed readers (skip to step 2 if you haven’t used Google Reader)
• Chrome feed reader extension
• Firefox feed reader extensions
• Outlook as a feedreader
• Internet Explorer feed reader set up

And if you’re more of a visual learner you can watch this video from AOMedia.