RSS Feeds enable you to be alerted to the news, comments or topics you are interested in as soon as they are published. One common way to subscribe to an RSS feed is simply by clicking on the orange xml icon, copying the URL that shows in your address bar, then pasting it into the RSS
reader of your choice.
If you are using any of the four RSS reader/search properties
below, you may also click on one of the corresponding icons to auto-subscribe
our feed now!
Need an RSS reader? You can use a free web-based reader such
as bloglines,
enabling you to subscribe to feeds and monitor updates online -- or a desktop
application such as Pluck.
For a comprehensive list of RSS Readers for all platforms, click
here.
An Overview of RSS (provided by Room
214)
RSS is the format used for syndicating news content and weblogs.
When information is syndicated for the web, it becomes accessible through an "RSS
feed." You know that an RSS feed is available to "subscribe" to when you see
those orange xml icons and other buttons like them.
Reading syndicated content is done one of two ways, generally speaking - either
through a website that translates syndicated content into a readable web page
(such as Bloglines) or through what is commonly known as desktop RSS Reader
(there are now multiple rss readers you can download for free).
If you have ever tried to click
on the orange icon without having an RSS Reader or an account
with a search property (such as My Yahoo!) - then you likely saw a bunch of
meaningless code.
Fortunately, all the latest web browsers (Internet Explorer 7, for example) will
soon have "subscribe" buttons on their toolbars that will make subscribing to
RSS feeds much more intuitive.
No doubt, subscribing to RSS feeds will become
just as common as bookmarking web pages - perhaps even more so -- and will be
a normal part of web surfing as more website owners take advantage of using
RSS feeds.
