Neowster.com

What is RSS? Its stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically the icon you see on the left is the official representation of the presence of a RSS feed. That’s all you need to know regarding the technology. As for how it works and the driving force behind it, the video below will give you a good overview……

Now that you know how RSS works, how can you benefit from it? We will illustrate with the example of keeping track of Singapore News via Channelnewsasia’s RSS feeds using Internet Explorer 7.

1. identifying presence of rss

How do you know whether the site is RSS enable? Simple. As long as the RSS logo of on your browser lights up, the site which you are browsing has RSS capabilities. Alternatively, terms such as “Subscribe”, “Feeds”, “Atom” and XML are signs that these are links to RSS of the site and all refers to the same thing.

2. subscribe to feed

Now that you have identified the feed, you want to save / add /subscribe to it. Clicking on the icon will reveal a drop down menu featuring the different kind of news to keep track of. As you can see, the feeds are categorized, and we’re interested in the Singapore News feed. Click on it.

After you click on it, it will jump to the actual feed location. Click to “Subscribe to this feed” and it will bring up a dialogue box for you to choose how you want to organize your feed and save it.

3. Reading your feed

So how can you access your feed for updates. On your browser click on the “star” button. Select “feeds” and it will display all your subscribed feeds. Clicking on any feed will bring you to the reader interface on your browser.

You will notice that the feed displays only the headlines and a short excerpt of the story. What is displayed is determined by the originator and cannot be set by you, so don’t bother fiddling around. Clicking on any of the headlines link will bring you to the actual site featuring the full story.

Of course IE 7 is not the only RSS reader available. There are hundreds available, and most are free. A great example is Google Reader which I highly recommend.

One important point to add it in many of these RSS readers, either on your mobile phone / pda etc, when you want to subscribe / add a RSS feed, it will prompt for the feed location.  What it is referring to is the address highlighted by the red box in the screenshot above. This address / url is the RSS.

Armed with this new found knowledge I hope you are ready to embrace RSS, and a great place to start is to subscribe to neowster’s feeds here and be updated on future articles…..