Lowell Telecommunications Corporation

A non-technical reader's guide to RSS
by Luke Razzell

RSS allows you to see updates from your favourite web sites without having to manually check each site. This is particularly useful for frequently updated sites such as blogs or news sites. RSS lets you follow any number of (RSS-enabled) websites from the comfort of your newsreader.

How do I use it?

1) Get yourself a newsreader, by creating an account with a free online service like Bloglines, or downloading a desktop application (similar to e.g. Outlook) such as FeedDemon for Windows or Shrook for Mac (a more comphensive list of desktop applications—including free ones—can be found here).

2) Find some RSS feeds. Newsreaders come with plenty of preset feeds to choose from, but you're bound to want to add RSS feeds from other websites too. You can find a site's feed(s) by looking for a button or link that says XML, RSS and/or "Syndicate this site"*.

3) For each feed you wish to add, click on the button or link on the web page, and select and then copy the address that comes up in your web browser** (don't worry about the nonsense text you'll often see in the main page). Then follow the instructions in your news aggregator to subscribe to a new feed, and paste in the link.

4) You'll see a list of all the recent items in your feed subscriptions, with summaries or full versions of their content. Then, every time a feed is updated with a new item, it will automatically appear in your newsreader—your personalised newspaper!

*these terms all mean what we're generically calling "RSS"
**an application such as Internet Explorer

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