You may have noticed the small orange icons on the right, near the bottom of this blog page, “Feed” and “Comments feed“, and below that an icon with the information “73 readers by Feedburner” (at least as of this evening). This tells me that at least 73 regular readers of this blog are subscribers who read us using our RSS feed.
If you’ve seen these icons around (and many blogs, and more and more websites have them), they indicate that RSS feeds are available for the particular sites. Basically, RSS provides you with a way of being notified everytime the content on a website (or blog) is updated.
However, if you’ve ever clicked on one of the RSS icons, you will discover that it looks like a lot of gibberish! RSS code is not very readable in a web browser – to read an RSS feed you will need an RSS reader, also known as an aggregator.
There are two main types of RSS readers:
- Desktop – you install the reader on your computer. There are many RSS readers which can be downloaded for free. Take a look at this huge list of RSS readers.
- Web-based – you sign up at a website that offers you the service. Examples of web-based aggregators are Bloglines, Kinja, Rojo, Google Reader and feeds.reddit. Because I work on as many as six different computers every week, my preferred RSS reader is web-based – I can access my subscriptions on any computer with access to the Net. I use Bloglines (at the moment I am monitoring way too many blogs via their feeds).
Why bother with RSS?
- Up-to-date content in one place – no need to check websites or blogs individually; your aggregator will let you know if there are any changes or updates!
- Spam free (although there is some advertising)
- Easy to subscribe and unsubscribe – I’m sure we can all relate to the problem of forgetting what address to send the unsubscribe command to…
- Privacy – no need to provide email address
If you want to read more about using RSS, take a look at this tutorial on RSS by Luke Rosenberger. (Thanks, Steven, for the tip!)
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