RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary depending on who you ask, and is very simply a way to read lots of blogs very easily and very quickly.

Any site you visit which displays the orange icon shown below (the colour can vary-mine is green) has a RSS feed. To make use of it, you need an RSS reader. It largely depends on what browser you’re using, as to what reader you will use, but RSS is supported by both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Simply click on the RSS icon and you will be taken to the sites feed, and asked how you would like to read it. A list of readers can be found here: I use Firefox, so this means I can use the Wizz reader add-on.

What this basically means is I can open a small side window in my browser, listing my favourite blogs. I click on the name of a blog, and a lower window presents the headlines of the last (typically 10) posts. I click on a heading & the page loads in the main window. If I come across a new blog I like the look of, I simply click on the Wizz feed search icon, and the feeds pop up in a new window. I drag a feed across into the sidebar & that’s me subscribed – easy as that.

The advantages of using a RSS reader for me, are that I don’t have a set of Bookmarks 6 feet long. I don’t have to remember any blog addresses, nor do I have to load every single blog to see if it’s updated – just click on the blog name in the sidebar and green means new posts, red means none.

The advantages for you as a blogger are the same reason: convenience. If you don’t offer a feed, and your blog hasn’t sufficently impressed a reader to bookmark you, you’ve lost them. Why should they extend their bookmark list, and go to the trouble of waiting for your site to load, to see if you’ve come up with anything better? However, they can add a feed in seconds, and spot the minute you post something new. I’ve subscribed to several new blogs in this way: some haven’t updated, and I’ve just deleted them. Others have produced a flurry of new content, the headline feature of the reader has caught my interest, and I’ve become a regular reader. RSS works.

If you’re worried about not being able to track the stats of your RSS subscribers, or about the various RSS formats, you’ll find that FeedBurner will solve those issues. I’ll cover this in greater depth in a different post.

It really is an excellent idea, and I currently have 50 (fifty) blogs in my reader-checking all of them for updates takes less than a minute – so you can check several times a day if you wish. So, grab yourself an RSS reader, and subscribe to your favourite blogs…and this one. Just click on the green icon on my right sidebar.