What is a RSS feed ?

One of the first things that visitors notice on visitng a blog would be the RSS icon or something that says “Subscribe to our RSS feed”. Bloggers and tech savvy visitors know about it but its amazing how many people ask me what RSS is. So this post is dedicated to them.

RSS (RDF Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Most blogs will publish an RSS feed which gets updated with the latest articles or posts on that blog.

So How is a RSS feed helpful ?

Visitors might like the content of different blogs and might want to keep a track of new content as it becomes available. Repeatedly checking each blog to see if there is any new content can be very tedious. Subscribing to a RSS feed would let them know about any updated content.

How do you subscribe to a RSS feed ?

RSS Readers allow you to subscribe to the RSS feeds of multiple websites and read them at a convenient time. There are many RSS readers out there but in this article I will show you how to use the Google Reader since most people already have a google account.

How to use Google Reader

Open a blog or website that contains an RSS feed and click on the option to subscribe to the feed (on this blog its on the top right part of the sidebar.

Choose “Google” from the screen shown above, then choose “Add to Google Reader”.

You can now login to Google Reader at reader.google.com at any time and read the updated content.