What are RSS Feeds?

Keeping up-to-date with information you want on the web can be difficult, especially when there are millions of sites out there. What RSS does is brings the latest information directly to you rather than you having to click from site to site. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What RSS does is to deliver content you have selected to one central place. If a website has RSS provided you can download the content.

Not all websites provide RSS, but it is becoming a very popular technology. Many news sites and 'webblogs' provide RSS feeds.

How do I start using RSS feeds?

To get started, you will need a news reader. There are many different versions, some of which are downloadable applications others are accessed using a browser. A list of news readers is available to the right of this text.

Once you have chosen a news reader, you will need to decide what content you want. For example,

If you click on the button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the RSS feed into your news reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader.

Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, have functionality which automatically picks up RSS feeds for you. For more details on these, please check their websites.