How can you tell that a website has been updated,..other than to comb through the pages on the site to identify what might be new? RSS feeds and RSS readers provide a solution.

What is RSS?

RSS Feeds

A website with an RSS Feed has a page that details new content in chronological order. It normally only displays a certain number of items and is sorted with the newest items at the top of the list. Each item is hyperlinked to the exact page within the website. This allows you to quickly see what’s new and click and read items of interest to you. The url for an RSS feed is normally the website address with “rss” or “feed” at the end. For example: is the Lanergy Solutions feed.

RSS Readers

Many companies, such as Google, provide RSS readers. These allow you to plug-in the url for the RSS feeds that you would like to monitor. You can pull up your reader and see a list of all new content across all the websites that you are monitoring. It’s a great way to stay updated and get your information in one place.

Microsoft Outlook has an RSS reader built-in. You can add the url for RSS feeds and it creates an email-like folder for each feed. The folder populates with new messages any time new content appears in the feeds you are tracking. Each new content on a website appears as its own message, so you can mark individual ones as read (similar to how you mark emails as read or unread). This is a great option because it prevents you from having to open a browser or other application to see the content in the RSS feeds.

Why RSS?

Think about the sites that you might want to monitor such as school events, news articles, etc. This is a way to save time and easily view new content at your own convenience. RSS feeds and RSS readers are meant to make our lives easier and to make some chronological sense of the massive content provided on the World Wide Web.