EDForum

What is RSS?

Simply put, rss is a way of allowing you to be kept informed of updates to your favourite sites in a way that suits you. If a site has an rss feed, then you can 'subscribe' to it and in that way be provided with a summary of any updates, which usually includes a brief description of the articles or stories added with a link to the content that's been updated.

You then use some form of software called an 'aggregator' to pull this feed, and any others to which you've subscribed, into one place. Rather than then visiting every site to see what has changed, you can view the output in real time and always know when your favourite sites have been updated, and can also choose whether or not to follow links to the updated content.

Sounds cool. How do I use it?

What you can't do in most cases is open the feed and have it make sense in your browser, the way that a web page does. They're intended to be interpreted by other software, and so you'll usually be asked to download the page or it will open up but look like a lot of code.

There are, however, a variety of ways to use feeds. Here are some of the most common:

Using your browser

Some browsers, such as Firefox, Opera or Safari, let you subscribe to feeds, and then they display them through bookmarks or input aggregators. Firefox, for example, will show a little, orange icon in the right hand corner of the status bar at the bottom of the page. If you click on it, it offers you the option of subscribing to the feed, which it does by adding it to your bookmarks.

Your browser help page will give you more information on how to do this.

Please note that Internet Explorer does not currently support rss feeds without additional software.