RSS is probably something you will have seen mentioned at various sites around the Internet, but not many people know what it is, let alone how to use it. I certainly didn’t. It was only because I needed to dynamically create one for a piece of software I was writing did I really look into it. Even after that, I still didn’t see a good reason to use it. In this article I will hopefully show you a little more about how to use RSS.
What is is?
If you have ever researched a little into RSS you will have probably found out that it stands for Really Simple Syndication. This isn’t really a good title unless you know what syndication means in this context. Basically its a way of sharing information with other people. If you are really that interested, there are a few variations on RSS such as ATOM. They’re all just reasonably simple XML documents that use a standard format to share information with others over.
Ok ok, that’s great, but what is it?
That above paragraph probably wasn’t helpful to you unless you’re a bit of a web geek. Let me explain it to you in a different way. Take e-mail for example. When you go and check your emails, you don’t go to each person you might get an email from and ask them if they have any emails for you: All of your e-mails are sent to one place where you can browse them all at once (your inbox). This is one of the reasons RSS is useful. It allows you to “subscribe” to sites. Using special readers (known as aggregators) you can combine RSS feeds from sites of your choice and view them all at once.
Perhaps an example might help: Say you visit a few blogs each day to check them for new posts. Wouldn’t it be simpler if they notified you when new content is available instead of you having to visit them all the time? This is what you can use RSS for. You can be notified when these blogs add new content without having to visit every site: it all gets sent to a common place, your “Inbox for the Web (RSS reader)”. This may be a tricky concept to understand unless you actually go and try it.
How do I use it then?
There are many RSS aggregators out there, and they’re all slightly different. I personally prefer to use Google Reader, just because of it’s simplicity. You need a Google account to use Google Reader, so if you haven’t got one already click here to go to the registration page. If you have an account already, head over here to add it to your service list. Once you’ve done this, just go to the reader and have a look around. Now comes the fun part: adding feeds. To do this, you first need to find some. You will have probably seen these little symbols around the internet - 
or perhaps a “Subscribe using RSS” link or something. All of these should link to the same thing, so what you need to do is copy the link’s location and paste it into the “Add Subscription” part of Google Reader. I will show you how to do this with images. In this example, I am subscribing to my own blog so that I can be notified when I post something new. The link to my feed is located on the navigation bar: the “Posts RSS” link.
Copy the location of the feed
First of all, you need to get the address of the feed. To capture this from a link, you will need to do two different things for Firefox / Internet Explorer.
Add the feed to Google Reader
Now you simply need to click “Add Subscription” and paste in the location of the feed (ignore the link that I’ve pasted, it doesn’t work).
And here’s one I made earlier
Now you should have a link on the left navigation to the Woolie’s World feed. When you click on it, you will get the last 10 posts. Whenever you reload the page it will automatically check with the feed to see if there have been any more posts, and just like an email inbox, it will have the number of unread posts in brackets and in bold.
As you can see, I have added a few other feeds to my Google Reader such as the Weebls Stuff feed as I like to keep up-to-date with the new animations. I also have a couple of blogs that aren’t updated that often as that way I don’t need to keep checking back with the website, I’ll just be notified whenever I visit Google Reader (I have it set as one of my homepages, makes things easier).
If you notice, the articles are marked as read whenever you scroll down past them. You can also set all the articles as read just like an e-mail system. You might also find it easier to change the way that you view the new posts. You can do this by switching between the “Expended View” and “List View” that are near the top right corner. I personally find the list view easier to read.
I hope this article has inspired you to give RSS a try. Once you do realise why its useful, you probably won’t go back. Its just one of those things that everyone mentions, but no one really knows how to use it. Good luck.
This post was written by 
Woodsup
December 30th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
Excellent tutorial, never bothered to look into it for myself but that sums it up really well.
Nicely done, I may even start using it