The following article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article “Metasyntactic variable”

If you’re still curious here’s what the WikiPedia has to say about RSS Feeds:

Overview, simple definition

Unlike conventional sites which rarely change their contents, blogs (online journal) are usually updated frequently. In order to keep up with what’s happening on blogs, there are ‘web feeds’, ‘feed readers’ take the content from selected blogs and deliver it to you, all in one place. This means you can scan and select new and updated material without checking blogs all the time.

Web feeds are just a special kind of web page, designed to be read by computers rather than people. They deliver new stuff directly to you as soon as it is published online. You can subscribe to receive new stories and headlines instantly, rather than having to look for the latest updates online. The ‘news’ can be any kind of content – articles, essays, images, music, video… Subscribing to web feeds is also known as ’syndication’ or ‘aggregation’.

Benefits

Keeping up-to-date with the information you want can be a drag. With feeds, you get the latest news and features delivered directly to you as it happens, without clicking from site to site.

You can browse headlines from lots of different sites in one place.

Unlike getting website updates by email, there’s no email address involved with feeds; so there’s no email marketing, no spam, no viruses, no phishing, no identity theft.

If you want to stop receiving news, you don’t have to send an ‘unsubscribe’ request; one click and the subscription is gone immediately.

How to use it

You need a feed reader – this is a tool like an email program. It’s like getting an email every time one of your subscriptions updates their content, except no email address is required. There are many feed readers – some are online (like a webmail account), some are offline (you download the program to your computer), some are free and some aren’t.

You may have come across feed readers already, if you use personalised home page services like My Yahoo or My MSN, you’ve got a feed reader already – that’s how content like news, weather and stock quotes appear on your personal page. You can also add content from any site with feeds to your page to get updates.

Other web-based tools are primarily dedicated to feed reading only. One of the most popular web-based feed readers at this point is Bloglines, which is also free and easy to get started with.

If you use the Firefox browser, you can also receive feeds from your tool bar by using the Live Bookmarks function. The next version of Internet Explorer will add this feature as well. On the Mac Safari does the same thing (provided you’re running the correct version).

Finally, there are the desktop-based feed readers, e.g Newsgator and Feed Demon or BlogBridge, these are like an email program for web feeds. Attensa for Outlook is a feed reader that puts the feeds in your Outlook. You can look for the feed reader that best suits your needs at the RSS Compendium.
How to add feeds to your feed reader

Not all websites currently provide feeds, but it is growing rapidly in popularity and many sites (not just blogs), including The Guardian, New York Times and CNN now provide it. First, look for the subscription or feed options. Many websites have links labelled ‘XML’, ‘RSS’ or ‘Atom’; or they may have an orange button (like the one in the RSS section in the sidebar on the right).

To add Tania’s feeds to your feed reader simply copy the link and then paste it into your feed reader. To copy the feed either right click on the orange feed buttons to the left and select “copy link location” or alternatively copy the feed from below:

feed:http://www.tanialacy.com/main/?feed=rss2 – this is the feed for blog entries that are posted to the Tania Lacy site.

feed:http://www.tanialacy.com/main/?feed=comments-rss2 – this is the feed for comments that readers might leave associated with a particular entry.