You’ve been around the internet block.You’ve made it through the ping-ping-beep-bop-bop that is dial-up internet, the impossibly slow download and upload speeds, the advent of blogging, video streaming and tons of other bells and whistles that make the modern day entity of the internet so amusing. So what is that little orange icon you’ve been seeing everywhere? RSS? Just what does RSS stand for and what can it do for you?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What the heck does that mean to the normal person? Here’s how RSS works and can help you in a nutshell:
1. The internet is too large of a playground. It used to be that websites would ask you to bookmark their urls and periodically check back to stay up to date on their shiny new content but that quickly became too big of a hassle. Everyday, millions of people update their personal blogs, media professionals update news blogs, YouTube stars update their content feeds and so forth. If you just bookmarked your favorite websites, you’d go crazy just seeing if there is any new content, let alone being able to tell if it’s relevant. And with that much information overload, you’d be hard pressed to even remember if the content you’re perusing is new in the first place.
2. Everything needs to come together. So what’s the answer? In short, it’s RSS. Really Simple Syndication. Pretty much every site that gets regularly updated (including ours) generates a feed. This feed pushes out any new content from that particular site to any of the subscribers of that feed. Every time our site updates, the RSS feed gets updated and shoots our content to any of the cool people currently subscribed to our feed. There’s no longer a need to constantly bookmark our site and check on it throughout the day to see whether or not we’ve updated. You can now just check your nifty RSS reader to read every one of our updates right after we’ve updated. Really simple.
So how does the whole process work? Where do you begin? You first need to choose an RSS reader. You might have software that can handle RSS feeds already (Safari, Apple Mail) and not even know it. I have friends that have used NetNewsWire. I personally like to use Google Reader so I can access my feeds from any computer and it has some pretty cool commenting/sharing features that make the RSS experience more social. After you’ve chosen your reader, go to your favorite websites, look for the little RSS icon, copy the feed link there and subscribe to each of those feeds in your RSS reader of choice. Organize the feeds however you like but now you can easily stay up to date on any of your favorite websites, including The Postgrad! We know how busy you are so give yourself some time by jumping on the RSS bandwagon!
Make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
RSS FTW!!!!
oo i likey.