What Is RSS?
This is an unfinished What Is RSS? page I’m working on for another project. I’ll be working on it this week, so please feel free to leave comments and links to your favorite explanation. It needs to be Real Simple.
What is RSS?
RSS is a way to gather news from all your favorite Web sites and blogs in one place. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Anyone can syndicate their content in an RSS feed, and anyone can subscribe to it. Web browsers like Safari and Firefox already alert you when there are RSS feeds present on a Web page. The next version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will do the same.
You can always just look for this little orange button: 
What happens when I click the little orange button?
If you click on the little orange button, in most cases, all you’ll get is an unfamiliar-looking XML document that looks like this:
That’s not important. What is important is that the address, or URL, of this page can be pasted into a news reader. Try adding the URL of the Spartan Daily’s RSS feed (http://www.thespartandaily.com/rss/feed.php) to your personalized My Yahoo or Google home page. We’ve even included a few buttons to add the Spartan Daily headlines to your news reader accounts in one click.
Why should I use a news reader?
A news reader helps you get more of what you want. As you start to gather a variety of RSS feeds from your favorite information sources in one place, you no longer need to visit each and every one of your favorite Web sites. Instead, they come to you.
From your desktop or Web browser, you can view headlines and articles from as many sources as you like, all on one page. This saves time, and allows you to easily scan the news for what you care about. New items are delivered to your personalized news page, and deleted after you read them. You only read what’s news to you.
Which news reader should I use?
There are a wide variety of news readers available, but Bloglines and Newsgator are two of the easiest to use. Click here for a tutorial on how to get started with Bloglines.
Other news readers you might find attractive:
- Pluck is an Outlook-style news reader for all operating systems.
- Sage is a lightweight extension for Firefox.
- NetNewsWire is for Mac only.
For more news readers, search Google for “feed reader”, “news aggregator”, or “RSS reader”.
[tags]rss, what is rss[/tags]