TMW Ideas

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. It is a tool that allows you to see the latest headlines, updates and news from your favourites sites without having to visit every single site. Your RSS reader (I'll come to that) will display the headline to you, and you just need to click on it to see the story. It is really simple. Hence the name.

RSS readers.

There are a variety of ways to get your RSS feed. Some internet browsers have them built in (Firefox and the latest version of Internet Explorer, for example), or you can get an RSS reader (Feedburner is a popular one).

I find the simplest way is to set up a Google Homepage (please comment if you know or prefer another way - I'm going to tell you the one I feel most comfortable with).

Seeting up a Google Homepage is easy - when you get to Google, you'll see a link in the top righthand corner - “Personalised Homepage”.

Click on this and it will take you through to a page that looks like this. You can decide what you'd like to appear on your homepage by using this link.

You see at the top, next to the seach is “Add by URL”. If you click on this it will open a new dialogue box.

Now, what you need to do is click on the RSS feed symbol on the blog/newspaper/site you'd like to subscribe to.

This will do one of two things - if you've got a reader set up, it will happen automatically. If you haven't, you'll get a page that look like this.

Copy the URL, and paste it into the dialgue box on your Google Homepage. Hey presto, you can now see the latest posts on the blog without having to go to it.

Other resources -

BBC Guide to RSS News Feeds
Wikipedia entry for RSS