RSS Feed? Live Bookmark?

[RodneyIsGodney]

What are these things? I see that little orange thing up there in the address bar when I'm on GW - as well as other sites - and was wondering what it's all about.

Does anybody know?


(mods, if this is in the wrong place feel free to move it to it's rightfull place.)

[Darren]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss

[Jeffala]

http://www.whatisrss.com/

[Melak]

to sum it up, it basically compares to a newspaper. You need to download software (or use an online service) when then acts as a newspaper, which you can then pick and choose the articles for. You do this by getting the rss feed url (which you get by clicking on the orange rss icon or by looking for a link on the page called rss), then add that url to the rss s/os (software/online service).

Once that's all done, any time there's an update to the site (or specific part of the site depending), it will pop-up near immediately in your rss s/os. Depending on how the website has done it's feed it will either be just a link back to the site where you can read the new item, or the entirety of the new item will be contained within the new item in your s/os.

It's a great way to stay up to date on whatever you are interested in.

[RodneyIsGodney]

Thank you Darren, Jeffala and Melak.

I was quite curious about it ...seeing that orange symbol in the address bar really got me thinking.

[Jeffala]

I use NetNewsWire on my Mac and subscribe to over 100 feeds that update every 30 minutes. It's a good way to stay on top of things (like new threads on the forum ).

I've also used Vienna, Bloglines, and Google Reader. I liked them all, but liked NNW better. I liked using RSS Bandit on Windows.

Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer (7+), and Opera will all aggregate feeds for you and there are a ton of extensions for Firefox that add additional feed readers to the browser if you don't like the built-in implementation.

You can also get addons for Outlook that add feed reader functionality to the program. Mozilla's Thunderbird comes with built-in support for RSS feeds.