Press Row

If you’ll excuse me for one moment, we here at Press Row are not bashful about our willingness to step into nerd-dom every now and then.  This will be one of the moments.

One of the most useful and coolest new features circling the web these days is RSS–which they wanted to be so easy for people to use, that one of the S’s actually stands for “Simple.”  RSS (Wikipedia) lets any Internet user “subscribe” to a Web site, letting the site notify them when new content has been published.  If you subsribe using an RSS reader, it’ll even deliver the new content to you.

It’s so simple to use, that I think the only reason more people don’t use it is because they’re just unaware of how easy it is.  You don’t even need to download a program onto your computer if you don’t want to.  There are tons of free RSS readers, like Google Reader, which I use.

So how do you do it?  Well, first pick an RSS reader–let’s say you’re using Google Reader for now.  Create an account if you don’t already have one (it’s free) or log in if you do.  Next, find one of your favorite web sites or blogs, and find the little RSS 2.0 link, which usually looks like a little orange box with sound waves on it.  Press Row’s RSS feed links are on the top right-hand corner of the page (in gray) or in the “Subscribe” widget on the right-hand sidebar navigation panel.

When you click on it, you can usually just pick your RSS reader from the little drop-down menu that says “Subscribe to this feed using”.  When you find your reader and click Subscribe, it’ll bring it right to your Google Reader homepage.  Alternatively, you can copy the RSS URL (it’s usually the web site’s main URL, with something like /feed or feed.rss or .xml after it) and manually add it to your subscriptions.

Almost every blog and website offers some type of RSS feed, so if you have a long list of blogs or sites you check every morning, try taking advantage of RSS to cut down your surfing time.

Also, if Google Reader isn’t your thing, go ahead and scope this wide list of RSS “aggregators” that are out there.  Happy surfing!