What’s RSS? How do I subscribe to an RSS feed?
Simply put, RSS is a great way to keep up with the latest information on topics that you care about.
Without RSS, if you want to see if your favorite blogs or news websites have any new information, you have to navigate to their website and look. If there’s nothing new, you’ve wasted your time. Multiply this by a dozen blogs, or a hundred, and you’ve wasted a lot of time.
RSS saves you that time by checking blogs and news websites for you and letting you know that the site has changed. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” and it lives up to the name: It’s really easy to aggregate a large number of websites into one, which lets you save a lot of time.
How does it work? First, you need an RSS reader. There are dozens of these out there. Personally, I prefer FeedDemon, which costs $30, but there are also a lot of really good free readers out there. Google makes one; Bloglines is often recommended to me; and Newsgator offers a way to get your RSS feeds in Outlook. For this tutorial, I’ll assume that you’re using the free, web-based aggregator Bloglines.
The next step is to set up your account. On the Bloglines home page, click the big “Subscribe now! It’s free” button in the center of the page. Here, you’ll enter an email address and password for your account. Once you’ve done so and clicked “Register”, check your email for the confirmation message. Click the link in the email you just received, and you’ll be ready to go.
Once you’ve set up your account, you have the opportunity to subscribe to a number of popular feeds. Now, what’s an RSS feed? Basically, it’s a stripped-down version of the site you want to subscribe to. When the author updates his web page, the feed updates at the same time. The RSS reader checks this feed every few minutes to see if there’s any new content. If there is, then it presents the new information to you.
Bloglines has collected the links to a number of popular feeds and gives you the chance to subscribe to them right away. Go ahead and look through this list and put a check next to the ones that sound interesting. If you don’t like the feed, you can always remove it later. Once you’re done, click “Subscribe.”
You’re now in the main Bloglines window. As you can see, the sidebar on the left contains a list of all the sites you subscribed to. 
Click on one of the links. You should now be able to read all of the articles from that page (or at least a brief summary of the articles). Whenever any of the sites update, this page will also be updated with that new content. You can also click on the link at the top of the list (”[number] Feeds”) and read all of your feeds in one page. Pretty neat, right?
Now, to subscribe to sites not listed on the Bloglines page, you’ll need to find a link to that page’s RSS feed. This is probably the most challenging step; look for links marked with the letters RSS or Atom. The feed for Blog Jones is located at http://www.blogjones.com/WordPress/feed/. Right click on the link and click “Copy Link Location” or “Copy Shortcut” (depending on your browser). If you can’t find the feed link, try copying the url of the page you want to subscribe to instead (in the case of Blog Jones, it would be http://www.blogjones.com/WordPress/).
Then click on the “add” link at the top of the Bloglines sidebar. 
Paste the link into the text box and xclick “subscribe.” On the next page, click the check box next to the name of the site you want to subscribe to, then click Subscribe at the end of the page. You’ve now added a new subscription
RSS is a powerful tool. According to FeedDemon, I’m subscribed to 93 different feeds. I’m able to check 93 different websites over breakfast–a feat I’d never be able to accomplish without RSS. There’s a lot more interesting stuff to learn about RSS, but I’ll let you explore it for yourself. Enjoy your newfound tool!
