What is RSS?

***UPDATE*** April 26, 2007- Ian at Brave New Traveler shares a great video on RSS that he found at CommonCraft. Watch the video to find out how you can subscribe to Rambling Traveler. It explains RSS even better than I did below.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. There are all kinds of sites that explain how it works, but I'll try to sum it up with my non-technical understanding. Basically, many of the websites you read that are updated frequently have RSS feeds. You can subscribe to these feeds, and get the updates on a feed reader that you choose.

I use Google Reader, but there are many others, including Yahoo and Bloglines. When a new article is posted on a site that you follow, it shows up on your reader. You can read the post right there, or you can follow the link to the actual site and read it there. It's great, because you don't have to go to each site individually to look for new content, the reader tells you when it's there.

Many sites have orange subscription buttons that you can press to subscribe to that feed. Your reader can tell you other ways you can subscribe to a site. For more information, Ezine Articles has a good explanation of RSS newsfeeds.

Hopefully this will help you understand what that orange button is on my sidebar. If you like Rambling Traveler, you can subscribe to the posts and comments. Whenever I post a new article, or someone leaves a comment, you'll know about it.