RSS Explained

RSS is like an old-fashioned news ticker: its a standardized format that lets us share content (whether its a news story, podcast, or classified listing) among different websites.

RSS is used by sites with weblogs, like the Charting Maine's Future blog, and news web sites, from the New York Times to The Bollard, to publish and syndicate the content of the sites in a simple form. And it's not just for news: you can also use RSS to keep track of free stuff on Craigslist, or photos of Mt. Katahdin on Flickr. In RSS 2.0, RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. 

Why Use RSS?

By subscribing to RSS feeds from different news sites and blogs on the web, you can piece together your own personalized newspaper, one that's constantly updated throughout the day.

Here's an example: a simple personalized newspaper on the Bloglines feedreader service, cobbled together from the feeds mentioned above.

Many people have RSS feeds delivered to their web home page, like My Yahoo! or iGoogle; others read their feeds to special feed-reading software or websites, like Microsoft's Feedreader or the web-based Bloglines or Google Reader.

Once you've subscribed to an RSS feed, the headlines or summaries from a web site will update automatically for you. You get the latest information from as many web sites as you subscribe to. Then if something interests you, you click an individual headline to go to the full information.

Many web sites use RSS, including all the major news sites and almost all blogs; if you see the icon at left, that means an RSS feed is available. Setting it up is realy simple. Try it for yourself using our tips below.

How To Use RSS Feeds

To use RSS you need to grab the RSS feed from a web site. You can do that using a web browser, a bit of software for your computer called an RSS aggregator or one of the Web based aggregation services. For the purposes of this demonstration, we'll be using Bloglines, a free web-based service. If you have a Google account, we recommend trying Google Reader.

Once you've signed up for an account, you'll have an empty screen, ready to be filled with feeds. Click the "Add" or "Add Subscription" link to start filling in your reader. You can cut-and-paste the web address of a favorite blog, and your reader will try its best to find an RSS feed there. Here are three feeds from GrowSmart Maine to get you started:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChartingMainesFuture
The Charting Maine's Future blog feed

http://digg.com/users/growsmartmaine/history.rss
GrowSmart's Digg feed (news stories from other sources that we've read and recommend)

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=JmrBszCR3BGE31H66UjTQA&_render=rss
The Standish Model Town news feed.

If you're using the Firefox browser, RSS feeds are even easier to subscribe to. The orange RSS icon will show up in the address bar on any web page that has a feed: just click it, and Firefox will display the feed along with options for subscribing to it.