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RSS Feed — What is it?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed is a method of getting updated content from a website that has more-or-less frequently updated content.

How does this work?

An RSS capable website has one or more places where you can sign up to the ‘feed’. This is a special page which lists the last 10-15 (or more if it’s set up that way) changes on the website. It’s in a format that a feed reader software can use.

Actually all the new browsers are capable of handling RSS feeds, including the two main ones: Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox 3.

A common example of an RSS feed is a news site like CNN.com. They provide a feed that gets updated as soon as a new story is published on the website. Or download websites provide this so that people can get notified about any updated software right away.

What’s the point in RSS feeds?

RSS feeds make it easy to get notified about content changes without having to visit the website itself. Also many RSS feed softwares can do a thing called aggregation. That means that you can pull the content from different websites and view them in a single list, filter them, sort them, etc. Basically makes it possible to sort through more information with greater ease.

Let me show you how it works. My example will be signing up to this website’s main feed using Internet Explorer 7.

1. Go to the main page of the website: http://www.computerwizardindy.com/
   
   Here you will see that the orange RSS icon is lit up. Click on the little arrow on the right side of the RSS icon. This will list the available feeds – there’s only one at the moment for this website so click on that.
2. You will get a picture like this:
   
   Click on the Subscribe to this feed.
   Click on the Subscribe button on the window that comes up after that.
3. Now you are subscribed. Internet Explorer will check periodically for new content and if you want to see what’s new then just click on the yellow star icon on the left and then to the feeds button:
   

Besides the new browsers, email clients also provide RSS support. Outlook 2007, Thunderbird has these. Windows Vista also has a built-in sidebar gadget for RSS feeds. There’s also several good free RSS feed readers, I’m just listing two here for you to try (if you click on their names it will take you to the download page)

- Feed Demon

- FeedReader

I hope this article was educational to you and that you will be able to successfully subscribe to the Computer Wizard feed.