How to get going with RSS

By Penny Hawthorne | 22 September 2005

For many people RSS is just something talked about by computer geeks. It is something to do with blogs but it is not obvious how to use or why it is a good idea. So, for your enlightenment today, here's a guide on how to get up and running with it.

Reading blogs and news sources can be a hassle if you have to remember which ones you like or if you keep going to a site only to find it has not been updated. An RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader keeps a list of your favourite sites and tells you how many new articles there are. That's great if you want to keep track of a blogger like publishing empire boss Tim O'Reilly whose his content is first rate but who only writes new content occasionally.

On the Mac, an excellent RSS reader is NetNewsWire Lite. It's free of charge. This is what it looks like:

Likewise, SharpReader is an good reader for Windows. Thunderbird is a good choice on for Mac, Windows and Linux if you want a program that both does e-mail and RSS.