RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, allows you to view a website’s latest content within a feed reader. The point? You can bundle multiple websites’ feeds and catch up on all of the latest updates to your favorite websites from one place, instead of visiting each site manually. For more technical information, you can view this Wikipedia article, but this post will feature more of how to use RSS.
RSS is usually identified by this ubiquitous orange icon pictured above. If you see it, it usually designates a feed.
If a website has an RSS feed, the RSS icon will show up in the Firefox location bar…
Or Internet Explorer’s RSS button will light up.
Safari doesn’t use the RSS icon, and instead displays a blue button in the location bar with the text RSS.
Google provides an excellent web based feed reader, called Google Reader. We’re going to show you how to subscribe to an RSS feed using Google Reader.
Click the RSS button. A menu of possible choices shows up. For now, we’re going to use CNN’s Top Stories feed.
Google will greet you with a portion of the RSS feed and asks you how you want to subscribe. Since we’re showing this for Google Reader, select Google and click Subscribe Now.
Google will ask whether to use iGoogle or Add to Google Reader. Pick Add to Google Reader. Your new feed should show up in Google Reader.
Click the RSS button on the right part, and click CNN – Top Stories.
Internet Explorer will also show the feed. Since it doesn’t provide a way to subscribe using an application other than itself, we’ll need to copy the URL of the feed.
Head over to Google Reader, and click the Add Subscription button. Paste in the URL you copied from the feed, and click Add.
We’ve covered how to subscribe to an RSS feed using Google Reader in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
