What Is RSS?

If you’d like the technical definition and explanation of RSS, read this article.

For the rest of you, thank you for stopping by and taking a moment to learn about one of the coolest Web / blog technologies.

What you see to the left of these words is the standard RSS button. You’ll see this image or a creative alternative of this image on blogs and Web magazines where feed subscriptions are available. To the right and slightly above these words, you should see the creative RSS image I chose, which essentially looks like a billboard bearing the RSS image.

So let’s break down the terminology real quick and get started. Most blogs platforms automatically come with RSS technology, meaning most blogs automatically have RSS feeds you can subscribe to.

Rather than confuse you with explanations you might not understand, let me just say that subscribing to feeds is a way to compile a quick and easy way to glance at the latest blog posts from your favorite blogs so you can decide whether to open and read or ignore.

Let’s learn how to subscribe. I’ll show you two ways. The first requires you to use the Firefox browser. The second requires you to have a Gmail or Google Reader account. Both of these can be gotten free.

Subscribing to feeds using your Firefox browser

Step 1: Click the RSS button on a site you want to subscribe to.

It will lead you to either a page that looks like this (click to expand view)

or a page that looks like this (click to expand view).

Either one is fine. The screen you see will depend entirely upon the type of RSS the site is using and doesn’t really affect you at all.