What Is RSS And How Do I Use It?

RSS stands for “Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion”.  What this means for the end-user is, you can go to a web­site, and sub­scribe to their RSS feed (usu­ally by click­ing the sub­scribe but­ton, which I have located at the top of my web­site).  You can sub­scribe to my RSS feed here.

When you sub­scribe to a RSS feed, you get to see all the lat­est con­tent, with­out hav­ing to go to the web­site. RSS is very impor­tant for both the end user and the con­tent provider.  With your RSS feed active, peo­ple who enjoy your web­site can check out the feeds and see all your lat­est con­tent. For users of RSS, you get to check out your favorite web­sites from inside one pro­gram, or reader, and see if there is any new content.

RSS Read­ers That I Recommend

You can use many pro­grams includ­ing out­look on win­dows to sub­scribe to RSS feeds, on a Mac you have many other options as well.  My per­sonal favorite RSS read­ers for both plat­forms are Net­NewsWire for the Mac and iPhone, and Feed­De­mon for windows.

http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWire/Default.aspx
http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/FeedDemon/Default.aspx
http://www.newsgator.com/individuals/netnewswireiphone/default.aspx

How To Use The RSS Reader

When you use one of these pro­grams, all you have to do is input the rss feed into the pro­gram. When your using the pro­gram, you will see a num­ber pop up and you can see if any new infor­ma­tion has been added to the web­site, and how many new sto­ries there are to read.

Online RSS Readers

You can use RSS online, and not be required to use a piece of soft­ware.  Google’s Reader is my favorite online reader: http://www.google.com/reader You can go ahead and sub­scribe to my feed by going to this address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/enlightenedwebmastery And adding that address into your newsreader.

Ben­e­fits

When you do this, you will be able to see the lat­est updates, and stay informed when some­thing new is posted. This saves you from hav­ing to keep revis­it­ing web­sites all the time, and lets you get your news all at one place. Using RSS does not stop you from hav­ing to visit web­sites, you still can, and you have to to inter­act with other read­ers, but it does let you see at a glance what is new on your favorite sites, and I highly rec­om­mend using one. The ones I listed above are free, and fully fea­tured.

These are not gimped ver­sions, and they work very well.  I have tried out tons of read­ers in my past, and those are my favorites. For the mac there is another option, called news­fire, it is great, but it is not as full fea­tured as Net­NewsWire. If you are some­one who is not tech­ni­cally pro­fi­cient, News­Fire is a great choice for the mac user.  For those that demand more power, and want it for free, you do not get any bet­ter than my above men­tioned recommendations.

Con­clu­sion

I highly rec­om­mend start­ing to use RSS read­ers, and using them to there full advan­tage.  It is the eas­i­est way to keep up with what is going on.  If you’re a blog­ger who has a web­site, you need to be pro­mot­ing your RSS feed.  I will be cov­er­ing how to use RSS on your web­site in an arti­cle later on this week.  Be on the look­out for it.  RSS Read­ers make your life so much eas­ier. I rec­om­mend sub­scrib­ing to my RSS feed, you can do so by click­ing here –> http://feeds.feedburner.com/enlightenedwebmastery I hope you enjoyed this arti­cle, See you soon.

Tagged as: RSS, Web