I'm in a relatively boring class right now, so I thought I'd get started on an article explaining RSS to all of you readers out there who don't know what it is. RSS can change the way you blog and read blogs. It can save you a LOT of time. RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. It's a listing of headlines and summaries of recent posts or articles on a blog or newsite. RSS files are in XML formats and can be read by RSS Readers. What's the point of having an RSS file? Let's take a look:

Joe Blogger is reading our site. He sees our little badge that says RSS 2.0 that links to our RSS File.

Joe Blogger has an RSS reader program, also known as an Aggregator. The one he uses is called SharpReader, which is coincidentally the one I (brendoman) use.

Joe drags the link to our RSS feed into SharpReader's address box. Our ten most recent headlines show up in his reader panel. When Joe clicks on a headline, the contents of the post show up in the reader panel. When he double clicks on the headline, the actual post shows up and he can then comment on it.

Joe decides he really likes our blog. He decides to subscribe to our feed, so he clicks on the "subscribe" button in SharpReader. Now SharpReader will check our feed every 30 minutes (or whenever Joe specifies it to) to check for new updates. When there are new updates, they will show up in bold in the reader panel. It's just like checking e-mail.

Now Joe doesn't have to surf a million different blog pages looking for updates that might not even be there. All he does is subscribe to the blogs he likes and SharpReader does the work for him.

Joe is a happy guy.

That concludes this edition of RSS for beginners. I'll be back later with more advanced tips and some other information. Check out this and this article for more information.