Understanding RSS.

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Author: Farivar, Cyrus

If you regularly surf news sites on the Web, you've probably encountered the little RSS and XML icons by now. That's RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, a technology that uses the XML (Extensible Markup Language) format to bring the headlines from all of your favorite newspapers and blogs to you, saving you the trouble of surfing around for It yourself.

Essentially, RSS works by turning the Web into something more closely resembling e-mail, pushing content to you and collecting it in an easy-to-browse format.

Say your daily blog and news digest consists of POPULAR MECHANICS, The New York Times, Macworld and your best friend's blog. If you wanted to check each of those twice a day without RSS, you'd go to each site individually. With RSS, you can let a computer program do all the work. Here's how:

1. Choose how you want your news delivered. RSS readers work through some e-mail programs and are built into some browsers; RSS services can also be found online. Popular readers include NewsGator for Outlook and NetNews-Wire for Macs (newsgator.com), and My Yahoo (my.yahoo.com).
2. Find a site with RSS feeds. Ours is popular mechanics.com/rss.
3. Make a copy of the URL of your desired feed. A) Click the "subscribe" button in your reader, and then paste the address into the pop-up window.

PREVIEW PANE This window gives you a brief summary of and link to the story behind the headline.

HEADLINES A scrollable List of headlines from the feed is displayed like subject headers in e-mail.

RSS FEED LIST All of your news sites, blogs, etc., can be accessed quickly and organized in folders.

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By Cyrus Farivar