thesmallest.com lessonettes: short essays on whatever

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Introduction

Imagine, rather than having to go to different news or commentary sites one by one and spend your time poring through the stories, you can have headlines presented to you in a compact, unfussy and consistent way. When something catches your eye just click to see a little more details, and if it still sounds promising you can click again to read the whole thing. Result: less wasted time, less hassle, and more of the information you want, whatever it might be. That's RSS.

Each article presented in an RSS channel can link to a different web page with more complete information, so the syndication and spread of information from around the web is very easy. The programs you use to read these channels are generally called RSS feed readers or aggregators; they collect the information found in the RSS channels you decide to read in order to let you browse them at your leisure.

With major organisations such as the New York Times through to the most obscure blog writers now using RSS to spread their thoughts and reports, this is a technology whose time has definitely come. Here we’ll explain how to get started with RSS readers, how RSS actually works, and then how you can use it in your own site and join the growing information syndication revolution.

Next: getting started with RSS...