The other day someone asked me how I keep up with over 300 web sites.

Assuming everyone knows about feeds I casually replied “with RSS Feeds”. They gave me a kind of strange look as they said, “What the heck are RSS Feeds?!”

So, I asked them, “How do you visit your favorite web sites on the Internet?”

They replied, “Well, I just scroll through my Bookmarks and click on the sites I want to visit to see if anything new is going on at them.”

“Doesn’t that take a lot of time to visit all your favorite sites?”

“Yes, but how else will I know if there is anything new happening on them?”

“With a Feed Reader.”

“Okay, so what the devil is a Feed Reader and what’s it do?”

“The Feed Reader, reads the Feeds.”

“Well, DUH! Come’on stop messing with me!”

“Okay, here’s the deal. Using Bookmarks to visit your favorite sites takes a lot of time, and if there has been no new information posted to a site, it waste your time because you have to go to the site to see what’s happening there – if anything. But, if you use RSS Feeds and a Feed Reader – your favorite sites will send any site updates to your Feed Reader where you can scroll through them in ‘one place’ to see which ones you want to visit and which ones you don’t want to visit if the updated information is of no interest to you. So instead of you going to the sites – the sites come to you.”

“Sounds great, but I don’t know anything about RSS – what the heck is RSS, anyway? It sounds really Techie and Geeky. Probably really complicated too! “

“Nah, it’s easy to use RSS (Really Simple Syndication). If you can Bookmark a web site, you can subscribe to the site’s RSS Feed. Then all you’ll have to do is open your Reader and all your favorite sites that have new updated information on them will be right there in your Reader. Kiss your Bookmarks good-bye!”

After we finished our conversation I got to wondering how many Saigon Kids know about RSS and how many are using our Blog RSS Feed to keep up with what’s going on here on the Blog.

For those of you who are not familiar with RSS here is a short video that explains it in – Plain English – instead of the usual Geekese – LOL 🙂

Pretty cool, isn’t it!?! You can have all your favorite sites come to you to let you know when they have something new for you – instead of you having to go to all of them to check for updates, etc.

So, where are the RSS Feed Subscribe links on our Blog, you ask?

One – the orange standard icon – is located at the top of your screen to the far right of the URL of the site. Then there are several others located at the very bottom of the Menu over there on the right hand side of the page. That’s what all those little ‘buttons’ are right under “Recent Posts (rss)” and “Recent Comments (rss)”. These are links to some of the most popular RSS Readers. Each different Reader has it’s pluses and minuses … Google Reader is, in my opinion the best – overall. But, they all work. So pick whichever one you like best.

I hope you found this helpful and will begin to enjoy the benefits of RSS – but, as my friend Lee said in the video, “be careful – it can be addicting” – LOL 🙂

As always, you are welcome to leave your Comments below.

Bob