RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a quick way to find out the latest information from your favourite web sites. RSS feeds (also known as 'site feeds', or 'Atom feeds') are intended to be a quick summary of new information, with a link through to the full article in our calendar.

To take advantage of RSS you will need a feed reader (or news aggregator) - software that keeps abreast of information from sites in which you are interested, and allows you to see at a glance what's new.

Telling your feed reader to watch a feed is called subscribing to that feed (see below for details). For most feeds this is free, and doesn't require telling the site anything about yourself.

There are three main types of feed reader:

Another type of feed reader is a desktop application dedicated to pulling together and organising many news sources. These are usually more powerful - and correspondingly more complex - than the basic RSS support currently provided by browsers. For example, they can usually notify you immediately when feeds are updated.

Some of these products come with a selection of news sources pre-subscribed, or offer subscriptions to various packages of feeds by subject. A short list of free desktop readers for Windows (all of which require the Microsoft .net Runtime):

RSS Reader

RSS Bandit

As you will generally come across feeds while surfing the web, it may seem natural to use a web-based feed reader. This has the additional advantage that you can check your feeds from any computer. Some popular web-based readers are:

My AOL - My MSN - My Yahoo - netvibes - Google Reader - bloglines - newsgator - Windows Live.

Subscribing to RSS feeds there are two different ways to find an RSS feed on a web page. Most sites display the RSS icon somewhere on the page . In an RSS-aware browser the icon will also appear next to the page's address or, in the case of IE7, on the toolbar. In the Mac OSX browser Safari the address bar icon looks like

How you subscribe depends on which browser you favour:

Internet Explorer 7

Add the RSS to your browser's feed list.
Click the RSS icon in the toolbar, then click on 'Subscribe to this feed' in the yellow area at the top of the page.

To add the feed to your web-based reader
Click the RSS icon on the page and choose the name of your feed reader from the Subscribe Options list.

To add the feed to your desktop reader
Right-click the RSS icon on the page and choose on 'Copy Shortcut'. Paste the feed URL into the appropriate place in your feed reader.

Internet Explorer 6 (IE6 has no built-in RSS support.)

To add the feed to your web-based reader
Click the RSS icon on the page and choose the name of your feed reader from the Subscribe Options list.

To add the feed to your desktop reader
Right-click the RSS icon on the page and choose on 'Copy Shortcut'. Paste the feed URL into the appropriate place in your feed reader.