What Is RSS & How It Can Help You
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it helps to easily distribute website information and content to anyone that subscribes to an RSS feed. Note, subscribing is always free.
RSS works beautifully when you are interested in many different websites whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. So instead of having to visit many different sites on the off chance that there's something interesting you want to read, wouldn't it be better to have all the headlines delivered to you (from all the websites you follow) and then simply click on the articles/posts that interest you.
- For example, you regularly follow 30+ websites
- With RSS you can check all 30 sites from the one program window without having to physically visit any of the sites in question
- RSS is therefore a massive timesaver and brings some hyper efficiency to your web surfing
We've provided some further RSS help below including some free software.
More RSS Advantages
- You don't need to give any website your email address because updates are not delivered this way
- To subscribe to a website all it takes is a couple of clicks
- with so much email spam around even if you subscribe to an email newsletter it might not get through (spam blockers might intercept it), but with RSS you'll always get notification of website updates WITHOUT the risk of spam
- Because RSS isn't email it's impossible for Trojans or viruses to get into your computer when using it
How RSS Works
To utilise RSS you either need some RSS software or you can view the updated posts through your browser such as the excellent Firefox. Some of the software costs money but it's not necessary to pay anything because there are plenty of free RSS Readers, or as they've often call RSS Aggregators.
Go check out some of these RSS Readers listed in the table below to get more of a feel how they work. Or, take our advice and download the excellent Desktop Sidebar software which is discussed in the next paragraph.
