For those of you who don’t know what an RSS feed is—well, now is an opportune time to get up to speed.

RSS, short for “really simple sindication” is a way to keep tabs on what your favorite  sites are publishing. You set up an RSS reader on your computer and then select any website of interest to you that offers an RSS feed. Often these are news websites, social commentaries, celebrities, to name a few. If you point your RSS reader at www.slate.com/rss (for example), the reader will display headlines and previews of the most recently published stories and links that will show you the complete article. The advantage? Instead of wasting time refreshing your countless bookmarked websites, new content on those sites comes directly to you.

Many websites now offer alerts to readers for every piece they publish; offering more descriptive headlines and longer article previews, so it’s easier to get a real sense of what a story is about before you click through to read it.

To “subscribe” to a RSS feed , you need a feed reader. Simply point the reader to the URL (address) of the site feed, and it will do the rest: it will display the contents of the feed in a window or panel for you. The feed will look like a series of messages. Although the word “subscribe” is used, there is no actual subscription (in the traditional sense of the word) involved. You do NOT need to give out your email address , fork out any money, nor furnish any information whatsoever. Your feed reader does all the real work: it checks the website regularly to see if the feed has been updated. If the latter has been changed, the feed reader software will inform you and allow you to read it, giving you the illusion that you have subscribed to some sort of newsletter or message service.

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