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RSS Feeds
What is RSS?Top
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it's basically a computer-readable summary of the content of a Web page. Sometimes this summary is just the headlines of the articles on the page, or the headlines plus a sentence or two excerpt of the articles, or even the headlines plus entire articles.
What's the benefit?Top
The real benefit of subscribing to an RSS feed from a site is that you no longer need to visit the site itself to stay up-to-date on important information. You might be quite interested in Sheriff's news flash, but are you going to pop over to the site every day?Subscribe to the RSS feed, though, and your RSS Reader will do all the work, showing you only what's new since the last time you've checked the RSS feed. And that's the real value of RSS: to be able to stay current with dozens or even hundreds of Web sites, quickly and efficiently.
How to use RSS Readers?Top
The program that does know how to both read and keep track of your favorite RSS feeds is called, logically enough, an RSS Reader.
There are many different options for RSS Readers, ranging from standalone applications to plug-ins for popular email programs like Microsoft Outlook, to plug-ins for Web browsers like Firefox. Apple's latest Safari browser for Mac OS X includes an RSS reader too, for example.
There are also web-based readers:
