What is RSS?

What It Is?

RSS is a special format used for delivering news from different sites to you. For example, news from the TNK-BP website, after their publication, may automatically be forwarded to your computer. Using RSS is especially convenient for gathering information from different sources at the same time. RSS provides you with news from all the websites of your interest without the need to visit them and saves you a lot of time. A special program collects news and interesting information (feed) and delivers them to you. You only have to look through the collection of the latest news, updates, events, etc. gathered for you by the program.

How Does It Work?

RSS readers, special aggregator programs, are used for reading RSS streams. RSS readers browse the websites of your interest and inform you about all their updates. Usually, information on updates is presented as a stream of short announcements with links to the respective full pages. A quick look at this stream is enough to decide which of the news are interesting for you. If news deserves your interest, simply click on the link to go to its full version.

How to Use It?

There are several ways of receiving RSS streams.

1. The most common way is to install a special aggregator program on your computer. There are numerous aggregator programs adapted for different operating systems, for example, FeedReader, RSSReader, RSS Bandit. These programs place their indicator on you taskbar that inform you on the availability of new information (feed) like it is done by mail programs or messenger such as ICQ: as soon as a new message comes to your computer, a blinking icon lets you know about it. To build or customize your own RSS stream, you have to specify the RSS feeds of your interest in the aggregator by dragging or copying the respective links to the dedicated field.
2. Another way of reading RSS streams is using web-based aggregates, such as News Alloy. A personal RSS stream may be formed and browsed at these sites. An advantage of this method is that you do not have to install programs on your computer as everything is performed online through the Internet. Apart from that, the use of web aggregators does not tie you down to just one concrete computer and allows you to receive the latest news wherever you are, at work, at home, or traveling.
3. Moreover, certain browsers and mailers, such as Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, can process and read RSS streams. For example, Mozilla allows you to add RSS streams to bookmarks and browse RSS streams of news and updates directly on the information panel. As to Microsoft Internet Explorer, only versions 7 and higher support the RSS format.