A simple RSS explanation
What does RSS stand for?
That’s an easy one, it stands for Really Simple Syndication.
Why do you care?
Ever been hooked on a website (possibly mainly blogs) that gets updated almost daily and found yourself visiting the website in the hope that there is new content there?
Well, RSS is a way for a website to package the new content, for example a new post on a blog or a new article on a news site, so that it can be read by an RSS reader without having to visit the site directly. The website doesn’t necessarily need to put up the entire article into the RSS feed as it could put a summary of the article, but due to how RSS is created, you would see that there is a new article, and when this article was made available.
How do I know that a site has a feed?
Also really simple. If you’re using Mozilla FireFox or the new IE7 (Internet Explorer 7), you should see an icon (now the standard feed icon) similar to the orange icon on the right, in your browser’s address bar. Of course, it won’t be this big though. 
I fully recommend FireFox, especially since they released FireFox 2 with it’s enhanced RSS Feed capabilities (and all those other spiffy reasons for using FireFox that I show you on this site).
Of course, all of this is a VERY simplified explanation and I fully welcome further explanations in the comments, but it is a general introduction to a FANTASTIC RSS reader by Google named… wait for it… you GUESSED it, Google Reader. And I’d like to show you how to use this to be more efficient when reading blogs and other sites that provide RSS feeds. So stay tuned (by subscribing to my RSS feed )
