What are RSS feeds and how to use them

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RSS icon 100×100What is an RSS feed?

An RSS (Rich Site Summary) a format for delivering regularly changing web content, designed for Blogs, Newsgroups, ect. Basically it is a small text document that contains a summery of the recent posts on a Blog or newsgroup that a User/Feed reader/Aggregators can download to check if there is any new contact on a particular website.

One of the biggest benefits for the user is that you can check to see if one or multiple websites have been updated with out having to visit each and every one.

How do I read a RSS feed? What are RSS feed readers and news Aggregators?

Most people use a RSS feed reader, or news Aggregators which is a utility that downloads a RSS feed and displays it in a easy to read format. Most Feed readers also organize your feeds in various formats, (by date, by site, by content)

There are a variety of different RSS feed readers available for all different platforms. Some popular feed readers include

  • FeedDemon - My favorite feed reader and the only one that I have used. It costs about ~$30
  • Mozilla Thunderbird - Free, I have heard very good things about this feed reader but I have not tried it for my self.
  • Google feed reader - Free

Where can I go to get RSS feeds?

The RSS feed for this website can be found on the site bar “subscribe to RSS feed” A list of all the feeds that I regularly read can be found in my opml (Outline Processor Markup Language) file. My current feeds

Other popular sites that provide RSS feeds, Feedburner

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