Have you got a favorite web site?  One you visit every time you get onto the Internet?  Perhaps you have several or lots.  There are probably lots of web sites that you've seen that were good, but you just can't go and visit them all - it would take too long.  What if all the latest information on those web sites could come to you and you could skim through them to find the interesting bits and leave the rest?  You can - and I'm going to show you how.

I'm talking  of a technology called RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication).  RSS is a technology that is designed to allow software to "harvest" web pages and deliver them to you to read when you are ready.

How does this work?  Its pretty simple really.  It really just involves some special software (readily available for no cost) that can contact those web sites for you, retrieve the new content on that site and store it on your computer for you to view when you are ready.

How do you know what pages have this ability?  That too should be pretty easy.  One of the most obvious is that you can look for or  on the site.  Another way is to look for the words "RSS", "XML", "RDF", "Atom" or "Feed" on the page - these all mean much the same thing for the sake of this discussion.  Another way is to look at the top of your web browser - as most modern web browsers support RSS and can alert you to its presence.

When you do find these tell-tale signs you can click the icon or text and you will see a page similar to the following:

This is the RSS Feed - again, it doesn't look hard to read, but that is  because the browser has dressed it up for you.  The information on this page can be put into a RSS Reader (that special software I was talking about before) and then the RSS Reader will retrieve it periodically for you to read at  your own leisure.

In the next few days I will explore two RSS Readers - one you didn't know you had and one that you can download for free that really make reading web sites a breeze.