RSS, generally thought to stand for "Really Simple Syndication" allows regularly changing content from multiple websites to be delivered to you, without you having to visit the sites. Many websites have links or buttons labelled "XML" or "RSS" or "Atom". And these days, lots of sites will instead use a little orange button.
RSS Logo
All of these are ways of saying that the site you're viewing has a feed available.
PostEverything provides a variety of different feeds for different functions, including a news feed, and a feed for our recent releases that is also available for specific product types.
Just like when you want to watch a video clip or listen to music on the web, you need a "player" of some kind to subscribe to feeds; most of these tools are free.
The "player" for a feed is called a feed reader. This tool lets you subscribe to any feeds you want, checks automatically to see when they're updated, and then displays the updates for you as they arrive.
Feed readers can run on your computer, or you can sign up to use a feed reader that runs on the web. If you use one of the web-based readers, you can access your feeds from anywhere you go, just by signing into the website that manages your feeds. If you use a feed reading program that is installed on your computer, your feeds can be stored for you even if you're not connected to the Internet.
If you want to use a web-based programme, many people choose My Yahoo!, Google Personalized Homepage or My AOL to read feeds right within the home page that their browser starts in.
Other providers of web-based feed readers include Rojo, Bloglines, Attensa Online, or NewsGator Online. All of the web-based services are free.
Anyone using the Mozilla Firefox web browser has support for feeds built-in, and Microsoft Windows users have support for feeds in Internet Explorer 7. Apple Macintosh users can also use the built-in support for feeds in the Safari web browser.
If you want to run a feed-reading programme on your computer, there are a few options. Different news readers work on different operating systems, so you will need to choose one that will work with your computer.
If you want a separate program to read feeds, you can use FeedDemon or NewsGator for Microsoft Outlook or Attensa for Outlook if you're on Microsoft Windows. Both tools let you switch between these programs and the web-based reader at any time.
If you're on a Macintosh running OS X, the most popular feed reader is NetNewsWire, which can also connect to the web-based services.
Once you have your feed reader, when you visit websites that syndicate their content, you can add their RSS feed to the list of feeds your feed reader checks.