Today is the first ever RSS Awareness Day! The organizers (Daily Blog Tips) have asked participants to blog about RSS on May 1, so here’s my contribution.
Now, I know that typically an awareness day is used to highlight a major social problem in the world. So if you’re unfamiliar with RSS you might think that it sounds like an abbreviation for a disease, as in:
Person 1: “Yeah, my dad’s living in a home now. He’s got ESRD.”
Person 2: “My mom just found out she has RSS.”
Person 1: “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
Person 2: “Yeah, she doesn’t have much time.”
But that isn’t the case. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS document, commonly called a feed, contains either a summary or the full content from a website. You as the user can subscribe to a site’s syndication feed using a feed reader.
Maybe you’re thinking, “Why would I want to do that? I have enough online accounts and websites to worry about!” Do you have a few blogs or news sites that you visit the most? Have you ever found yourself going through your bookmarks, clicking through that list, wondering if someone has released an update, only to find that the content is still the same from when you last checked? That’s pretty frustrating, isn’t it? It’s also time-consuming.
What if you could go to one place to find out when all of your favorite sites had posted new content? That’s exactly what RSS is for! Once you subscribe to a site’s feed you will automatically receive all updates that are published in that feed. Typically a blog will include all of its posts in its feed, but some sites even let you subscribe to a specific category of posts. Similarly, on a news site you can subscribe to “All News,” but you can also subscribe to “Breaking News” or “Entertainment” or “Sports.”
The following video, created by the good people over at Common Craft, demonstrates what I’m talking about.
As the video explains, the first thing you’ll need is a reader. I prefer web-based readers because you can access your list of sites from any computer. I use Google Reader. I would especially recommend Google Reader if you already have a GMail or Google account. You’ll be able to use the same login information for Google Reader.
After you have chosen your reader you need to subscribe to your favorite websites. You’ve probably seen this orange image 
and blown right past it without even thinking about what it means. That’s the RSS logo. Most blogs and news sites will prominently display that logo somewhere on their page. If you don’t see it, don’t worry; it’ll appear on your browser as well. In Firefox it appears in the far right-hand side of the address bar. In either case, to subscribe to a site you need to click on that icon.
The page you’ll be taken to will either be a subscribe page generated by the site you’re visiting or a bunch of code. If you see a subscribe page, it will list a bunch of common readers for you to choose from. The Google Reader subscribe image typically looks like this: 
If it’s code you see, copy the address in the address bar and manually add it to your reader using the Add Subscription link. But you can setup Firefox–under the Options menu–to automatically take you to the Google Reader subscribe page whenever you click on that icon (instructions here). That way you’ll never see a scary page of code ever again!
Once you have all your favorite sites entered into your reader you will only have one site to check to see if any new content has been posted. And I’m going to give you one more trick so that you won’t even have to visit Google Reader to find out if there’s anything there waiting for you! There is a Firefox add-on extension called Google Reader Watcher. Once you install it and enter in your account information this little guy will sit at the bottom of your browser window, periodically refreshing, letting you know exactly how many unread items you have over at Google Reader.
For more information on RSS you can check out RSSDay.org or the Wikipedia entry for RSS.
Do yourself a favor and start subscribing to your favorite sites! You can start by subscribing to my blog: click here.
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