If you are coaching a youth sports team and having difficulty checking your favorite sites daily for the latest updates, then a RSS web feed is what you need. By subscribing to a feed, your reader software gets the latest updates from your favorite web sites without have to visit each one individually and ensures your privacy by not needing to join a site’s email newsletter. You simply open your reader (similar to an email client) and download the latest updates from all the subscribed feeds. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually and the number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly (like this one).
What Is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently
updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which
is called a "feed," contains the contents from an associated web site or dynamic section of the web site.
How do you subscribe to a feed?
RSS content can be read using “reader” software that allows the user to subscribe to a feed by entering the feed's link into the reader by right clicking an orange RSS icon in a browser, save the URL, and pasting the link. Many sites will provide the user with the latest 10 feeds by clicking on the RSS icon. This way, the reader can quickly preview the frequency of updates and content value.
The reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds. There are two major types of feed readers:
- RSS Reader
Most RSS aggregate reading software is very similar to email programs, but instead of incoming emails, they display news from the “subscribed” (registered) feeds. Unread news typically appears in bold, just like unread emails. Well known RSS readers are: Bloglines, Google Reader, and My Yahoo. - Web browsers
Most modern web browsers will read RSS feeds, but in a limited manner. Unlike aggregators, browsers will not save the news if you don't check on them every day, but will provide access to the last set of pre-defined feeds (usually about 10).
For more information, check out this easy to understand overview of RSS from Stephanie Quilao, How to explain RSS the Oprah way, the FeedBurner “Feed 101” page, or Wikipedia’s RSS description.