What is RSS?
RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a technology used by millions of internet users to deliver their favorite web content and keep track of their favorite websites. In the early days of the internet, to keep track of your favorite websites, you had to bookmark them and then check back frequently to see if anything new had been added. This got really complicated once you had a lot of bookmarks to keep track of. The main problem for users was that they were doing all the work. Well, someone got smart and decided to deliver updates to their website directly to those who wanted to receive it.
Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate
their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. You can get the latest updates and what’s new from Winning-Homebrew, upcoming movies, news from Fox News, or your favorite blog posts.
RSS allows you to stay informed by retrieving the latest content (updates from Winning-Homebrew for example) from the sites you visit most often.
The Benefits to you are:
- You save time by not needing to bookmark and visit each site individually.
- You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter.
- The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes most of the sites you visit.
- No SPAM!
- It’s easy to subscribe and unsubscribe.
- Many RSS apps include tools so you can discover sites based on your
favorite topics, and let you save your favorite articles to read later.
Once you start using RSS to track your favorite websites, you will wonder why you ever bookmarked them in the first place.
How do I use RSS?
The first thing you will need if you want to start following the RSS feed of your favorite websites is to get yourself an RSS Reader. An RSS reader is just what it sounds like, it “reads” the RSS feeds and delivers it to you. Here are a few choices:
- Feedly-The content you need to accelerate your research, marketing, and sales. 200+ Apps that work with Feedly. Use Feedly for Web, iOS, & Android.
- NewsBlur is a personal news reader, bringing people together to talk about the world. Use NewsBlur for Web, iOS, & Androi.
- Inoreader-the content reader for power users who want to save time.
- NetNewsWire-Feed reader for Mac OS X.
- SharpReader- is an RSS/Atom Aggregator for Windows.
- Liferea-the free news aggregator on your Linux desktop.
Most browsers support RSS feeds without downloading special software (see the browser’s Help for instructions).
Once you’re set up, here’s all you have to do to subscribe…Right-click (command-click for Mac users) on any page of this site. Then…Select “Copy Shortcut” (“Copy Link to Clipboard” for Mac), and paste
that URL into your RSS Reader of choice. Or, simply click the orange button on the top left of every page and select one of the options.
That’s all there is to it.
Cheers!