RSS: Check All Your Favorite Web Sites at Once

You see it more and more on Web sites:  "Click Here for your RSS feed."  You may be wondering, what the heck is RSS?  Do I benefit by using it?  Or is this just another sneaky ploy to get my email address for more advertising spam?  Read on and find out if RSS is for you.

RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication...really) is basically a way to monitor Web sites automatically for changes in content.  You select the sites you want to monitor, and RSS notifies you when new content on that site is available, such as news articles, blog entries, or podcasts.  A software program called a reader downloads the new content (either a summary or the full document) to your computer or to a Web site your reader can access.  You then scan the content at your leisure.  Think of it as an account that notifies you when your favorite Web sites change.

You can purchase software that you install on your PC to access these feeds, or you can use a free reader from an online site like Google.  The advantage to the former is that you have much greater control over what you get from the feed and how it's processed on your computer.  The advantage to the latter is that you can check your feeds from any computer with Internet access.

If you're using Internet Explorer 7 on your computer, RSS feeds are already built in to the browser.  If you click on the gold star in the upper left corner of your browser window (or press ALT+C), your window of favorites appears.  However, look at the second tab, labeled "Feeds".  This is where IE7 saves the information you choose to check when you select the RSS feed option on a particular Web site.  You can modify options such as how many items to maintain at a time, whether to download just a summary or the entire item, and how long to keep the items.  For the novice, I'd recommend using this as it's already available, easily customized, and easy to turn off if you decide RSS is not for you.  Do keep in mind, however, that if you use this on one computer (say, your home system), the feed will only send items to that computer.  You won't be able to see your RSS feed from a different system (say, your computer at work).

For more information on IE7's RSS feed options, check out Microsoft's tour at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/tour/rss/how.html.  For information on an online version of a reader, you can tour Google's version at http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlereader/tour.html.