Imagine you have 100 sites that you regularly visit, some more often than others. You visit them because they have something you want - content. The content can be anything from videos to shopping to important sites like this one. Each of these sites has hundreds of pages, which change frequently. How do you know what is new when you visit a site? You can visit every page and waste hours of time each day. You can hope they place new content in an easy to find place. You can just plain miss the new content and spend time trudging through pages you've already read. What to do?
This is where RSS comes in. RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication, an XML (extensible markup language) format. Think of RSS as a newspaper delivered right to your door. You check the headlines and read the articles you want at your leisure. The newspaper has covered thousands of stories in the last year, but you only get the new ones in the paper each day. More than likely you don't care about the PTA meeting from 3 months ago, but you might care about an article describing the upcoming road construction on your side of town. RSS gives a website owner the ability to send you just the important items. Unlike email where you can be spammed by anyone with your address, you choose which sites you want to keep track of. No one has your email address. You don't like the content? Unsubscribe. The best selling point of RSS, in my opinion, is the ability to monitor many sites from one location and at a glance see what is new. If it's interesting you are only one click away. Guess what? It's become so popular that both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 have RSS abilities built in.
What will you use RSS for? When I update my site, I'll post it on my RSS feed. If software company XYZ has an RSS feed they may post program updates on their feed. CNN will post headlines and breaking news on theirs, as do the New York Times, MSNBC, and others. You see a list of the headlines and with a simple click you go directly to the web page. No searching. No wasted time.
How do I get RSS feeds?
You have probably seen the signs of RSS and didn't even know. Sites offering RSS feeds have added icons to their pages which show they have a feed. Clicking on the icon subscribes you to the feed. Several of the icons used in the past are:
As you can see there are many different icons used to indicate the various feeds available. I think this has caused quite a bit of confusion for users and prevented the early adoption of RSS by users.
In the last year or so a common icon has began to appear. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 use this icon to represent RSS feeds so you don't need to worry about the huge display of icons to the left that vary greatly from each other.
The new icon is displayed to the right of the address bar in both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7. When you see the icon an RSS feed is available if you choose to subscribe. Isn't that much easier than looking all over a web page to find an icon that is different on each site?
I know you can hardly contain your enthusiasm so I will now unveil the new RSS icon (drum roll please).
Pretty simple, yet elegant with a touch of class, if I do say so myself! This is becoming the universal indication of an RSS feed. Firefox will display this in the address bar of a site which offers a feed.
Internet Explorer 7 has a tool bar button to indicate the presence of a feed.
How to subscribe to an RSS feed with Firefox
Firefox has the ability to read RSS feeds built in, but Firefox also has thousands of extensions that add functionality. I prefer to use a free extension called Sage for RSS feeds. Go to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/77/ and click the install link, which will download the extension and install it. You will have to restart Firefox to complete the installation. When you reboot you will notice a new button on the toolbar. This button opens Sage. You can change the order, location, and even which buttons appear by right clicking on a button and choosing Customize, which will open the Customize Toolbar Window. You can now drag buttons from the toolbar to the window, from the window to the toolbar, and from one place on the toolbar to another. When you are done click Done in the window.
Now that you have the the button where we want it let's click it. When the button is clicked it opens Sage in the side pane of Firefox. Clicking on the magnifying glass opens a discover feeds window. It's possible for a site to have multiple feeds and this allows you to choose which one you wish to subscribe to. I only have one. By highlighting the feed in the window and clicking the Add Feed button you subscribe to the feed, which will now appear in the Sage window. Pretty easy, isn't it?
Now you have subscribed to an RSS feed. What next? Sage automatically checks the feeds and displays the headlines in the lower pane. The full content is displayed in the browser window, with links to the full story or web page.
How do we add an RSS feed in Internet Explorer 7
If you are using Windows XP and haven't upgraded to Internet Explorer 7, you should. I recommend Firefox for web browsing because it's more capable and safer, but IE is integrated so deeply into the operating system and has so many vulnerabilities I believe you should upgrade. Even if you never use Internet Explorer 7 to browse the web, and you shouldn't, the slightly increased security of IE7 is worth the upgrade. For those who insist on using Internet Explorer (why, oh why?) the upgrade can be found at the Internet Explorer 7 page. Unfortunately those using Windows 2000 and earlier operating systems can not upgrade.
When you arrive at a site with an RSS IE7 notifies you by the RSS icon in the toolbar. If you click this button a screen similar to this appears, which shows the feed. To subscribe to the feed you need to click the link or the star with the plus sign.
Once you have subscribed to a feed or feeds that star toolbar button allows you to open the feeds window and check for new content.
And there's more
Do you use Google.com or Yahoo.com for your homepage? Did you know you can add RSS feeds right on your homepage with both Google and Yahoo? You can. It doesn't get any easier than RSS! There it is. RSS in a nutshell. Try it out. It will save you hours of time and add new life to your web browsing!