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Writing

What is RSS and What is it for?

December 28, 2005

So you’ve seen the little orange link on all of these sites around the internet. What does it mean? What does it do? It’s a link for an RSS feed.

What’s that you might ask. Well the long and the short of it is that it’s a technology that you can use to subscribe to regularly published content. You can read news stories, blog posts, movie reviews, etc. from all of your favorite websites in one central location.

That central location is called your RSS Reader. There’s a wide variety of RSS Readers to choose from: NewsGator, Bloglines, and even the free, open-source email client Mozilla Thunderbird has RSS support. Each one of these readers have their own specific set up directions which you can find on their respective sites. Many of these will be easier than setting up a new email account.

Using RSS feeds will probably change the way you use the internet. I know that it’s changed the way that I use it. It makes getting content from a lot of different sources really easy and centrally located. And that is really helpful for me.

So without further ado, click here or copy this link and paste it into the RSS reader that you’ve selected. Also, if you’d like to read more about RSS, here’s a good primer. If you have any questions let us know and we’ll try and help.