RSS
RSS allows you to see when new content has been added to sites on the internet. You can get the latest headlines and articles in one place, as soon as they are published, without having to remember to visit sites every day.
RSS allows you to stay up-to-date, by showing you the very latest information that you are interested in. Not everyone agrees on what RSS stands for, but most people use 'Really Simple Syndication'. RSS feeds are just a special kind of web page, designed to be read by computers rather than people. Other websites currently providing RSS include the BBC, Guardian, New York Times and CNN.
How do I start using RSS feeds?
In general, you require something called a news reader. This is a piece of software that checks RSS feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added to them. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications which sit on your pc or mac. Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you either download your e-mail using Outlook, or keep it on a web-based service like Hotmail. Once you have your news reader in place, you determine the content you receive in your news reader by finding and subscribing to the relevant RSS feeds. Do this by getting your reader to 'search' for feeds on the page you're looking at.
How to subscribe
If you click on the button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the RSS feed into your news reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader. Most sites that offer RSS feeds use a similar orange RSS button, but some may just have a normal web link to the feed. Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, automatically check for RSS feeds for you when you visit a website, and display an icon when they find one. This can make subscribing to RSS feeds much easier. For more details on these, please check their websites.
News Readers
Listed below are a number of news reader options:
Windows
Mac OS X
Web
Browser
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