The RSS feeder. What is it, and how do you use it! **TUTORIAL*

An RSS feed is in its simplest form a lazy data gathering method. It is free to use, and after you read through this - you will see it is also easy too. It is used most commonly for blogs, news sites and various other sites that get content updated regularly. I only know a handful of people who have bothered to work out how to set them up - but for the most part, they swear by them. In this article, I shall endeavor to educate you to set up an RSS feeder for use in your daily web-life :)

Step the 1st: Set up a feed reader.
A feed reader is a site that you update with the feeds you wish to follow, and it will automatically gather the data for you to view within the reader interface. The advantage of this is that you can have a large number of articles that highlight themselves for your attention, to read at your discretion - instead of you having to search the web, type URL's or go to bookmarks. (The only real downside to the whole thing is the site you are visiting may rely on ad-revenue and at about 30p a connection - potential customers never actually visit the site - but this is not your concern!)

I recommend Google Reader as your first port of call to get your hands on a feed reader. If you already have a Gmail account - then you already have a feed reader, you just have to populate it! I have my homepage set to iGoogle so that I have everything organised in the one area when I open a browser window. Calendar, new items to the feed reader, news items, weather, etc etc.

Step the 2nd: Add feeds.
Blogs, web pages, news articles and various other places that have their content updated frequently often have a link to an XML document that contains the code for the reader to parse the information into your feed reader. Usually they are represented with the following:

RSS Feed icon.

or

 "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)"

When you click these links you will either be taken to a page where you are asked to select the feed reader you use from a list OR you are provided with a confusingly long wall of text. The former is easy. The latter requires you to copy the URL in the address bar and manually add the address into your Feed Reader. This is simply a case of selecting the "Add a subscription" icon at the upper left section of the page (at least for Google Reader) and pasting the URL into the address bar.

Step the 3rd: Enjoy.

That is it! You will now have your subscriptions in the sidebar and can click on them whenever you see them flag up with a number e.g "number(3)" instead of "number".

Go out, and enjoy the extra tool in your Geeky arsenal :) I use mine for blogs, podcasts and comics. It rocks.

Just dont ask me how to MAKE an RSS feed... Kinda know how... Never wanna try!

-V