Also see Glossary Item: RSS - Rich Site Summary

What is RSS? From BBC News

In a world heaving under the weight of billions of web pages, keeping up to date with the information you want can be a drag. Wouldn't it be better to have the latest news and features delivered directly to you, rather than clicking from site to site?

RSS allows you to see when sites from all over the internet have added new content. You can get the latest headlines and articles, or even audio files, photographs or video, in one place, as soon as they are published, without having to remember to visit each site every day

It takes the hassle out of staying up-to-date, by showing you the very latest information that you are interested in. It might help to think of them as the free, internet version of the old-fashioned ticker-tape news wire machines

Not all websites currently provide RSS, but it is growing rapidly in popularity and many others, including the Guardian, New York Times and CNN provide it

How do I start using RSS feeds?

The first thing you need is something called a news reader, it checks RSS feeds and lets you read any new articles that have been added to them

Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer, whereas downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer, in the same way that you download e-mail, or keep it on a web-based service

Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want to receive by finding and subscribing to the relevant RSS feeds

RSS at BBC news

RSS at bikalabs.com

RSS readers

There are several open source and commercial RSS readers available. Bika Lab Systems recommends Abilon News Aggregator. For a list of available RSS readers have a look here

The RSS logo in Bika indicates enabled sections

The icon identifies whether a section is RSS enabled

Enable

Right click the logo and save the link address, i.e. by selecting 'Copy Link Location' from the pop-up menu

Paste the address into the RSS reader of your choice to create an RSS feed. Ssee your News Reader for details on how to add feeds

RSS in Firefox

In the  Mozilla Firefox browser, preferably version 1.5 and higher, when a page is RSS enabled an icon will appear at the right of the web address in the address bar: 

Click on the orange icon and a pop-up will allow you to file the feed as a Live Bookmark, i.e for a feed of the Bika How To section:

Once the Live Bookmark is added, view the latest feeds by navigating to the RSS bookmark, which will open as a folder with the feed's pages listed. It would look like this:

The contents of the How-tos folder will be updated with the latest published documents

Bikalabs.com feeds

Right click on the icon anywhere you see it in the site

Or select feeds from here, right click on the icon at  the topics you want to track

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Background

How news aggregators and  RSS readers work

from RSS Specifications

1.  Websites summarize content in an RSS feed. See FeedForAll a feed creation tool for help 2.  Visitors download an RSS reader or 'news aggregator'. There are generally two different types of RSS readers. The first kind of feed reader is a self contained program, the second kind of feed reader use a web browser. Many of the programs are free, but generally those that have a small fee are more robust 3.  Visitors select the content and summaries they wish to view in a news aggregator or RSS reader. News aggregator and RSS reader are essentially interchangable 4.  Content is added to the news reader by entering the url or web address of the XML file. Sites that have an RSS feed available typically have an orange rss or xml graphic like this - or . Clicking on the graphic will provide the url of the feed. Some RSS readers will auto-detect an xml file on a site indicating that a feed is available. Assistance for those wanting to subscribe to RSS feeds 5.  Each time the feed is updated the content being viewed in the RSS reader indicates that there is new content. This insures that the customer has current information related to the topics they choose 6.  Professionals estimate that RSS will soon rival email's popularity as a content delivery method