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The Internet contains billions of webpages, and keeping up to date with the information you want can be difficult. RSS (short for Really Simple Syndication), was developed to address this challenge.
Instead of clicking from site to site to get the latest news and features, you can use RSS to subscribe to your favourite websites. It takes the hassle out of staying up-to-date, by showing you the very latest information that only you are interested in.
A program known as a news or feed reader (also called an aggregator), can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. Not all websites currently provide RSS, but it is growing rapidly in popularity and many others, especially in the news and media industry.
How do I start using RSS feeds?
On webpages, web feeds are typically linked with the word "Subscribe", or they will have an orange rectangle like this  , or an image like this  . Many news aggregators publish subscription buttons for use on webpages to simplify the process of adding news feeds.
To get started, you need an aforementioned news reader. There are many different versions available, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are free downloadable software. Different news readers work on different operating systems, so you will need to take this into account when you make your choice. All allow you to display and subscribe to the RSS feeds you want. Bloglines and FeedReader are two popular choices.
Once you have chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want. For example, if you would like the latest Scotiabank Find the Money Podcast episode, simply click on the RSS button. You can then subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the RSS feed into your news reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your news reader.
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