subscribing (RSS)

Think of it like a magazine subscription, only free. And without those advertisement cards that fall out when you open the pages.

You can "subscribe" to things like blogs or podcasts, using an RSS reader. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it is actually fairly simple. Let's say that you wanted to read the posts on a particular blog whenever the author posted a new one. You want to subscribe to the feed. There are a number of different ways to do this, we'll look at a couple.

Web Browsers: Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Opera, and others.
Using this blog as an example, when you go to haytech.blogspot.com you should see a little orange icon appear on your brower. Click that, and it gives you options for subscribing to the feed.

Websites: Google Reader, My Yahoo, and many others
There are various ways to set this up, but basically you need to sign up for one of these, then get the link to the RSS feed and paste it into the appropriate place. This is a little more difficult, but means that you can access your feeds from any computer.

You can also usually subscribe to RSS feeds in your email program, desktop widgets, or dedicated newsreader programs.

Does this work for you? How do you usually subscribe to feeds? Post questions and answers in the comments.