If you haven't heard about RSS before, trust me, you will! RSS stands for (depending on who you listen to) either "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary". I prefer the former.
RSS is a simple way to easily distribute updated information, be it breaking news on the major news sites like CNN, or occasional articles on a site like this one.
I'm sure you're noticed while surfing that many sites ask for your name and email address, in order to send you emails from time to time giving you "special offers", updates, news, etc. If you sign up, you'll be receiving announcements on a regular basis (sometimes called ezines). Sometimes the information they send you is valuable, sometimes not. Sometimes they maintain your privacy and don't sell your email address to others, sometimes they do.
With the above arrangement, several problems exist. First, you could tire of the information being sent to you. Generally you can easily unsubscribe, but what if the sender shared your address with others. A bigger problem is getting the information to you. Every day, spam filters are getting more picky about what emails they let through to you. You might be missing legitimate commercial emails that you've elected to receive, but your ISP is trapping before it gets to you. That can be very frustrating not only to the sender, but to the receiver that really wants to know what's new at a particular site.
The future is sure to see a change in the way emails are delivered. For example, we've heard about charging for emails. That would not be a pretty picture, and I can't see it happening, but there is lots of talk. With 60-70% of all emails sent being considered SPAM, that problem isn't going away, and a significant part of your day is spent weeding through the crap to get to what you really want to read.
RSS solves this problem, and is perhaps the first solution to SPAM overload. Those websites that have enabled "syndication" have made updates to their site (commonly called RSS feeds) available to the world through the use of feeds that can be read by readers (sometimes called aggregators) that can understand the special markup language (XML) that today's browsers are unable to currently decipher (I'm sure they will soon, though).
If you have an RSS reader (there are many available free), you can then add the feeds you want to your reader, and whenever an update is made to that feed, your reader will make it quickly available to you. The benefits are many. One, you don't need to provide your email address to the site. Two, the update won't get filtered out by your ISP. Three, the list of the feeds your subscribed to, and your currently unread articles, are always easy to find. Four, you don't have to visit your favorite sites every day to see if anything's new.
If you have an RSS reader, you probably know all this already, and all you need to do is go back to the page you came from, click on the button provided on our page to copy our feed information, and add our feed's URL to your reader. Then the next time we update our feed, you'll be notified, you won't have to check back every day to see what's new.
If you don't have an RSS reader, it's time to get one. You have several choices, but the two I've tried and use are MyYahoo and bloglines. If you don't have a MyYahoo account already (many millions do), just go to Yahoo and sign up for a free account, there will be a default MyYahoo page set up for you which you can edit to look like you like. To enable feeds, you need to use the "add content" button, or if you want to add a feed of a site that conveniently displays the "add to MyYahoo" button like we do on the page you came from, just click on the button and you'll be whisked away to confirm that choice. Then whenever you sign in to your MyYahoo home page, updates to your selected feeds will be ready and waiting for you to read, along with the daily news, sports, and weather.
Bloglines and the other RSS readers have similar search and "add feed" capabilities, of course, so you have plenty of free choices to get an RSS reader. There are also "aggregators" which is software that brings the feeds to your desktop instead of making you sign into a web site with your browser.
If you aren't using an RSS reader now, you're missing out on a way to cut down on email spam, and on a way to always be up to date with the sites that you frequently go to. If they don't have feeds available now, ask them why not? Feeds are here to stay, the sites that supply them are those that care about their visitors and want to make their site the most useful they possibly can.
Now that we've told you what those little buttons on the prior page are, what can you do with them? Well, if you want to be updated whenever we write an update to this site, just copy our feed's URL (you can either left click on the button that says RSS or XML (both give the same result), copy the URL of the page it goes to (it looks like raw HTML code, but it's actually XML code), just copy the URL that's up in the address bar, go to your RSS reader and paste in that address to add our feed to your reader. Or if you're using MyYahoo as your reader, click on that little button instead. If you ever tire of our updates, just remove our feed from your reader, it's as simple as that, we'll never ask for your email address.
