Here's how you RSS...

I was having a conversation with some friends a while back, and naturally, being geeks, we talked tech. Somewhere in the conversation, the question came up: "What's RSS? How do you use it?"

To this, I got to use the classic blogger-liner: "I'll post that up. Read my blog."

Which explains why I'm typing this down right now.

RSS basically stands for Really Simple Syndication. What's commonly referred to as RSS today is a collection of formats (RSS 2.0 being the most popular) for "feeds" to enable easy-publishing of content like blog posts, videos, photo updates, podcasts etc. etc.

You can then read an RSS feed with RSS readers like the one built into FireFox, Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft Outlook or use online readers like Google Reader or Bloglines.

How RSS works is basically like this: say you're really, really interested in reading my blog (!), and instead of having to go type and click www.davidlian.com every morning for your morning fix, you wanted an easier way to access it. All you have to do is click on my RSS feed icons that look like these:











Then, copy the URL of the page that comes up (which should look like this):

And paste it into your reader. I use Bloglines so my RSS subscriptions look like this:


So now, every time I post something new on www.davidlian.com, the headline and summary of that post will be delivered instantly to your RSS reader via my feed. You don't have to surf over to my blog to check for new posts, just turn on your RSS reader and wait for the new stuff to come in.

Okay, so that's my really simple guide to RSS for everyone who's asked me. It's actually more complicated than this, but I could go on and on.