I’m sure everyone has been to a website and seen this icon somewhere on the web page and it possibly has the word “Subscribe” somewhere close by. What is this symbol and why do I need to subscribe? The symbol stands for RSS (Really Simple Syndication). By subscribing to an RSS feed you get the option of viewing the website news feed in a separate news reader. So your next question would be why view it in a news reader? Why not just visit the web page everyday and view it from there? Simplicity is the reason. RSS is a stripped down version of the the website, no fluff, just the stories. RSS is just a plain text xml file. What is an xml file? It stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML is an entirely different conversation that I will set aside for another post.

So, how do I use them? There are several ways to view an RSS feed. There are several web based news readers such as Google Reader, and My Yahoo. You can also use a news reader app (my personal preference) such as Great News Reader, which is a free download.

Let’s start out using one of our web based news readers, in this example I will use Google Reader. If you don’t already have a Google account, you will need to sign up for one to use the news reader. Once signed up, go to http://www.google.com/reader and sign in. You will see a screen similar to the one below:

Google Reader Interface

On the left side you have a list of your subscriptions, this example image already has some current subscriptions listed, if you are new to the reader, yours will be blank. The right is the main window where all of your stories will be. The top left has big red button that says “Subscribe”. This is where you will enter the RSS feeds you want to use. Let’s go get an RSS feed and enter it into Google Reader.

I am going to use the web site PCMech for this example, it is one of my favorites.

PC Mech Website - RSS Icon in upper right

For this feed, you could simply click on the RSS Icon and it will take you to a Feedburner page where you can select various readers to add this feed to. In this case you would click the and it will add the feed for PCMech to your Google Reader. This is great if the feed is hosted through Feedburner, but a lot (most) are not. So, if the RSS feed is not hosted the easiest way to do it is to hover on the RSS icon and the feed url will show at the bottom of your browser. In Google Reader click on the red Subscribe button and type the feed url into the box provided. So, in this case you would type http://feeds.feedburner.com/pcmech/articles into the Subscribe box in Google Reader then click “add”. You should now see PC Mech show up in your list of subscriptions. You will now be able to read all the Top Stories in your reader without all the fancy stuff and fluff. Add as many subscriptions as you like. If you read several websites in a day, you could put them all in your subscription list and have them right there all the time. As a new story is posted on the website, your reader will update. This reader can be used to view blog posts and forum posts as well. Next, I will discuss using an app to view your news feeds.