What is RSS?

RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. RSS is a technology that is being used by many millions of internet users around the world to keep track of websites.

What is RSS feed

Many people describe it as a ‘news feed’ that you subscribe to. It is simply to tell a website to let you know every time that they update. In a sense, this is what RSS does for you. RSS is a technology that provides you with a method of getting relevant and up to date information delivered to your ‘RSS Reader’ for you to read in your own time.

It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quickly after it was published from many sites into one place.


How to use RSS

The first thing you would want to do if you’re getting into reading sites via RSS is to find yourself with an RSS Feed Reader.

There are many feed readers with a variety of approaches and features –like Google Reader and Bloglines. Either one will do if you’re starting out. I use Google Reader and there are many others to choose from but to get started either of these are fairly easy to use and will help you work out the basics of RSS.

The best way to learn how to use either Google Reader or Bloglines is to simply subscribe to some feeds and try it. Both have friendly help sections to answer your questions you may have.


On Site Subscription

You may have noticed a lot of little buttons and chicklets appearing on your favorite sites and blogs. Little orange buttons, ‘counters’ with how many readers a blog has. They come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few you might have seen:

Subscribe to Blogger Blogging Tips via feed

Bookmarking & Shortcoming

In the ‘old days’ of the web to keep track of updates on a website you had to ‘bookmark’ websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to check what had been newly added. But some main problems of bookmarking is as follows.

- When you are trying to track many websites at once it can get complicated.
- When you forget to check your bookmarks you can miss information.
- You may visit sites many times and end up seeing the same information, if those website do not update.

If you don’t want to Use an RSS Reader - Email is an option.

If you are not comfortable with the above explanation and seems little complicated, then you may subscribe through Email. Many sites in addition to enabling RSS feeds also provide subscription via Email.

Here at BloggerBloggingTips we have both RSS and Email subscription options, as it is indicated at the top right hand side bar where there is a field where you can enter your email address and receive emails with our latest posts. You can unsubscribe at any time and your email will be kept private and not used for any other purpose than to send these updates.