About RSS
Subscribe to the posts RSS feed for this website.
RSS (Really Simply Syndication) is a technology that allows you to be almost instantly updated as new posts are produced on this website. Or for any website with RSS capabilities, for that matter. Imagine your department store had a feature where you could simply say “keep me updated of sales” and you were immediately informed when the relevant updates were provided to your computer. Well, your department store most probably has that capability.
And its not a situation like email where you get spammed – the whole idea of RSS is you only get what you ask for. Its a request. You simply say no to the feed and it stops arriving.
Which brings us to how you can do such a powerful thing. Well, there are a number of RSS Readers which either view directly in your web browser or download onto your computer and which work as desktop applications. For example, I use FeedReader as a desktop application. Every 20 minutes or so it hunts through all the websites that I wanted to be kept informed about and voila the changes appear as plain text inside the reader. I simply click and go directly to the article.
You might also hear of RSS readers being called news aggregators – same thing. Don’t be confused by that.
How much time that saves me is immeasurable. I no longer have to search for information that is relevant to me… it gets updated to me directly via the RSS Feed. Which, in reality, is a simple text file that the RSS enabled website produces. So your reader (whether online or on your desktop) simply hunts down those text files for any changes.
If you still don’t understand what this feature achieves you should watch CommonCraft’s RSS in Plain English.
OR click this big orange icon and take it from there…
