Really Simple Syndication in case you didn’t know. Heck, I consider myself a geek and I don’t use it as much as I could. RSS is a great tool to track websites and blogs that you like without having to directly go there. The site produces a feed (like the latest scores on ESPN for example) that a RSS reader displays for you. This can range from article headlines, to brief summaries, to a full article. Subscribing to your favorite site feed is generally as easy as finding a little orange radio icon like you will see to the right of this page.

“How do I subscribe to these feeds”, you may ask. Well, thank you for asking. The easiest way of subscribing is by using your browser. For those of you using Firefox 2.x, if there is a feed available for a particular page you are browsing, the radio icon is probably on the right side of your address bar at the top of the browser.

By clicking on that orange icon Firefox will ask you how you would like to subscribe to the feed, offering multiple choices. I use the “Bookmarks Toolbar” option myself to have the feeds right at the top of my browser any time I want to check them.

I will give honorable mention to Internet Explorer 7 because it now has RSS capability as well. Unfortunately I don’t use IE, so I can’t say how easy it is to use their RSS features. If anyone wants to leave information in the comments, please do.

There are many, many services and even special programs that will track RSS feeds for you. As a matter of fact, there are so many that I will not even mention them here. Just go to Google and type in “RSS aggregator” for a vast amount of choices.

To summarize, RSS is a simple, neat way to track sites that you enjoy. When you use RSS you can pick through the posts and go to what sounds interesting, and keep track of when your sites update.

For more information, please visit Wikipedia and read the much better description they have on site.