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Do you always see the orange icon on interesting websites but don’t have a clue what it is? Well if you fancy keeping up with all the latest news, whether its updates on your favourite football team, gadgets, gardening tips and pretty much absolutely anything else you can think of, then read on. I will explain exactly what it is and how to use them, with links to a few of my personal favourite sites and programs that can utilise this ‘Orange RSS thing’!

Welcome to Web 2.0!

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It works by putting the latest content published by the website into a “feed”, which is a file that can be subscribed to using a program called an “Aggregator” or “RSS Reader”. This then allows you to keep all of your favourite website updates in one simple location. So instead of having to go to a million different websites every day to see if there are any new updates, they are all delivered to your RSS Reader.

Basically what that means is, if you find a feed, usually located on the website page (sometimes the little orange icon appears in the address bar). You can click on it, then once it is loaded into your RSS Reader, you click Subscribe, and that’s it! You will then be automatically updated when the site is updated. That is literally it! Easy isn’t it?

So… what RSS Reader should you use? Well I use a program called SharpReader but I only use that because I have been using it for years, am old fashioned and find it a bit of a nuisance to move onto the new, more sophisticated & suave Web Based RSS Readers. Another bad reason to use a “program” is that, if your computer suddenly dies, which they are known to do occasionally! Then, well, you will lose your nice collection of brilliant RSS Feeds! Now that I am writing this, I might attempt to do the mundane task of moving ALL my feeds (about 50 of them) to one of the sites that I am about to tell you about! (Unfortunately for me, I don’t think there is going to be a simple ‘export’ and ‘import’ function). Anyway, enough about me and my annoying tasks, lets get back on track and talk about some of these Web Based RSS Readers.

I think the best Web Based RSS Reader that I have found so far is www.netvibes.com. It uses a lush programming format called AJAX, and that means that the site can be moved around, edited and just generally chopped however you want it.

When you see an RSS Feed link, click on it, and you will be shown a page like this saying “Subscribe Now!”. Click on your chosen reader, in this case, the netvibes icon, but by all means, try one of the others, as they all pretty much work the same. In my case, I would have to do it the crappy way, click on the “Choose Your Reader” drop down list, then select SharpReader from the list.

After you click on one of those links, it will take you to the selected RSS Reader Website/Application. Some websites may give you a choice of 3 or 4 different feeds, don’t worry about this, they are all going to provide the same content, just in different formats. In most cases, just choose the one at the top of the list. If that doesnt work, then try another one, if that still doesn’t work, then, well, something is going wrong!

You can organise your feeds exactly how you want them, even have tabs for different subjects, you can also have all your web based emails, such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc all configured with NetVibes. Basically, there is far to much for me to list here EXACTLY what you can do on each RSS Reader, but that’s okay, these sites are so easy to use that they shouldn’t really require much explanation once you are on them!

Once you have had a play around and chosen your desired RSS Reader website, then sign up! (In some cases, you may have had to sign up anyway). This is good for many reasons. If your computer dies on you, then all you need to do is go to NetVibes again, log in, and there you have it, all your RSS feeds working great. If you use more than one computer, then you can log in anywhere in the world, and see all your RSS feeds exactly as you would from home.

My suggestion is then to set NetVibes (or whichever site you are using) as your homepage. You can then automatically see any updates from all the different websites on one page the moment you load up your Web Browser! I do hope that you are using FireFox as your Web Browser! So much nicer and built together with a lot of the Web 2.0 generation of websites.

Now you are ready to go and get your RSS kicks and subscribe to every website you come across! How about, to get you started, subscribe to my RSS feed!

Stumble it!