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>> BBC News: RSS for beginners
Something you’ll notice a lot on blogs, news sites and many other sites that are regularly updated is a little orange box in the margin bearing the letters ‘RSS’.
‘RSS’ stands for ‘really simple syndication’ – and anywhere you see that orange box, it’s good news for fans of that site, since it means that you can access their best content without having to remember the web address or visit the home page.
You may also see sites that invite you to ‘subscribe to an RSS feed’. Don’t worry about the word ‘subscription’ – no money needs to change hands. Subscribing is just a way to have your favourite web content delivered to you automatically, whether that content is news headlines, film reviews, photos, podcasts or blog updates.
Stand by for my cut-out-and-keep Website of the Day analogy to illustrate why RSS is such a fabulous time-saver. Normal web-surfing is a bit like having to make an extra journey to the newsagent every time you want to buy a different paper or magazine, and then remember exactly which shelf every magazine lives on. RSS is like having all the papers and magazines you want delivered to your house before you get out of bed, completely free of charge and with each publication already opened to the page you want to read. And the paper boy’s even picked up your photos from the chemist and recorded your favourite radio show, and left you a tape of it, cued up and ready to play.
In practice, an RSS feed is a way of offering the same content that you’ll find on one specific website, but in a format that allows you to view the content from many different sites in a single window at the same time.
To get all of this working for you, you need a ‘news reader’, which in this case is neither How Edwards nor Kirsty Young, but rather a way of accessing these RSS feeds. Some RSS news readers are software downloads that you have to install on your computer, but if you want to be able to access all your favourite feeds from any computer, you should go with a web-based service like Netvibes or Pageflakes
On either of those sites, you simply decide what web content you want to have delivered automatically – which means returning to the sites that interest you, copying the address of their RSS feed, and pasting each feed address into your news reader. Thereafter, your news reader will automatically check for new content on your favourite sites, and you can see it all in the one place.
If this is the first you’ve heard of RSS, I recommend BBC News’ excellent beginners’ guide, which has clear and simple explanations along with those orange RSS buttons for all the most popular feeds from across the BBC (from global headlines in video to album reviews from Top of the Pops).
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