Subscribing to Websites with RSS

Updates to this site are published in a format known as an RSS feed. Buy subscribing to this feed with special software, you can be notified automatically when the site has be updated with new photos and information.

If you already use an RSS reader, simply subscribe to the feed linked at the bottom of the side bar. If not, perhaps you've heard of RSS and wonder what the big deal is. Or perhaps you've clicked one of those orange RSS buttons, filled your browser with a page of XML garbage, then turned back and avoided those buttons. This is unfortunately a common experience on the web, which is why this introduction is provided.

So what are those buttons all about? They are links to RSS files that describe the content of the site in a machine-readable form. There are lots of different ways this file can be used, but one of the most common is to use the feed to discover when a website is updated. With RSS-enabled software, you can stop manually checking sites to see if they've changed and instead be notified almost immediately when a site you've subscribed to has been updated.

The basic concept is simple: you provide your RSS software, often called an aggregator, with the link to the feeds you'd like to subscribe to (typically, this involves copying and pasting the link from your web browser). The software then periodically checks the feeds to see if there are new stories, alerting you to any changes. Some aggregators even let you read the new stories within the aggregator itself.

In many ways, subscribing to an RSS feed is like making a bookmark in your browser, with one big difference. When you bookmark a site, you're noting that the site is interesting and you'd like to go back. The problem is that you often never go back because you forgot it was there. When you add a site to your RSS aggregator, you're still noting that the site is interesting, but you will go back, because the aggregator will tell you when there's new stuff to see. For this reason, web browsers that have integrated RSS support (such as Omniweb, Safari and Firefox) treat RSS feeds as "live" bookmarks.

In addition to these browsers, there are a number of stand-alone RSS readers, and also web-based readers such as My Yahoo, Bloglines, or Kinja. Each of these options has its advantages of and disadvantages. Pick a reader that works for you and then follow its instructions on how to subscribe to feeds.

That's all there is to it!