Copyright © 2004 Steve ShawNo doubt you have seen those small orange 'XML' or 'RSS' buttons beginning to spread across some of your favourite web sites.
Perhaps you have clicked on one out of curiosity, only to be faced with a barrage of angle brackets and undecipherable code, seemingly designed to scare heck out of anyone less than familiar with intricacies of this new fangled technology creeping across web.
But once you click on that button - what do you do then? This article will show you exactly what to do. RSS? It's actually Really Simple, Stupid.
The first thing to do of course is click that button. It may be an orange button with 'XML' or 'RSS' written across it; or you could see word 'Atom'; or, less commonly, it could be blue with maybe initials 'RDF'; or it could be a simple link with something like 'Grab My Feed'. Gets confusing, doesn't it? But what acronyms like XML and RSS actually stand for is less than important - what to do after clicking button is important bit.
After clicking button, you will see all that code - if you have ever viewed source code to a web page, it looks a little similar.
RSS is just another language of web, but you can actually completely ignore code itself, just like you can ignore source code behind web pages that you visit - you are only interested in end product that code is designed to produce for you, end user.
In case of RSS, that end product is up to date news on topics you are interested in.
For example, if you want to keep up to date with latest information on financial markets, or growing marigolds, or your Aunt Mildred's blog as she travels across Antarctic, and you see a feed on that particular topic, you can 'subscribe' to it and receive messages via feed, each time publisher of feed updates it.
So how do you 'subscribe' to an RSS feed? The important bit is what is in browser address (or location) bar after clicking feed button, i.e. bit at top of your browser window that usually starts with 'http://...' and tells you web address of page you are visiting.
After clicking RSS (or XML, etc.) button, you need to copy that address - it's that address that you need to 'plug' into what is generally known as a 'news reader'.