What is RSS?

Good question! Here’s why you should care.

Unlike getting website updates or ezines by email, RSS feeds give you absolute, 100% complete control over your subscription. You don’t have to reveal your email address. Plus, if you want to stop receiving content, you don’t have to send me a request to be “taken off the list.”

One click, and poof!: the subscription is gone. Plus, since there’s no email address involved, there’s no way a publisher (like me) can sell, rent, or give away the means to contact you.

That’s right: no more spam, viruses, phishing, or identity theft. And best of all, no reason to put yourself at the mercy of the publisher’s intentions. You won’t need to suffer through the legalese in my privacy policy looking for loopholes that will send you deeper into Inbox Hell. No more setting up dummy Hotmail accounts “just in case.”

Again, if you don’t like the content, you can make it disappear as fast as you can change a TV channel. With just one click.

Pretty cool, huh?

That is cool! Umm, what the heck is RSS?

Alright! Now we’re ready to get to that part.

RSS, which is shorthand for Really Simple Syndication, is simply an Internet technology standard that allows busy people to receive updates to web-based content of their own choosing. You might have figured that much out by now. But basically, that’s the essence of an RSS feed – you subscribe and then receive new content automatically in your feed reader.

If you actually want to know how RSS works, click here.

What the heck is a feed reader?

You may already be using a form of feed reader, and not even realize it. If you use personalized home page services like My Yahoo or My MSN, you’ve got RSS capabilities built in. That’s how syndicated content such as news, weather, and stock quotes appears on your personal page. You can also add content from any blog or other site that uses RSS to provide updates.

Other web-based tools are primarily dedicated to feed reading only. One of the more popular web-based feed readers is Bloglines, and it’s also free and easy to get started with.

If you use the Firefox browser, you can also receive RSS feeds from your tool bar by using the Live Bookmarks function. The next version of Internet Explorer will add this feature as well.

Finally, there are desktop-based feed readers. These function somewhat like an email program for feeds. Examples include Newsgator and Feed Demon.

If it sounds complicated, it’s really not. Again, with RSS, you’ll have the same convenience that email subscriptions offered in the old days without any of the potentially petrifying consequences of giving out your email address to potentially unscrupulous characters.

Sounds good. So how do I subscribe to a Feed?

First of all, look for the subscription or feed options (some bloggers make this difficult for some odd reason). You might see a variety of buttons (amusingly called “chiclets”).

If the site you want to subscribe to uses Bloglines to aid in the subscription process (like Winehiker Witiculture and many other popular sites), you’ll likely see the Bloglines icon or a standard RSS icon, which takes you to a page that will give you an array of the most popular feed readers so you can select yours, and you’ll go from there. This is the standard RSS icon:

Sometimes there will be a chiclet for your particular reader right on the blog that will take you to the appropriate subscription page. You may see the following chiclets, among others:

Finally, you may also see little orange buttons that say “XML” or “RSS”. Often, these buttons will take you to a page that looks like gibberish. In this case, you ignore the gibberish on the page and simply cut and paste the page’s URL from your browser and manually paste it into your feed reader subscription function. It’s easier than that sounds.

In summary: RSS solves BIG problems.

So there you have it: RSS is being adopted at a phenomenal rate, because it’s a good thing for everyone. The benefit to readers is obvious. And it’s good for publishers too, because we want to make sure that people feel comfortable subscribing, and that our message is not nuked by an overzealous email spam filter.

If there’s anything here that is confusing, or you have a question, please contact me and I’ll be happy to help!

Thanks to Copyblogger for a helping hand with this tutorial.