When you first venture into this seductive, addictive otherworld here online, there’s so much you don’t understand, so much that’s new. Some of it you learn about by reading, watching videos, asking friends, taking classes; some of it just seems to soak in somehow, or you just start doing it or using it parrot fashion, without understanding much about it. Or, you don’t do it at all, because you seem to be managing just fine without it, so it’s always left on the back burner.

For me, the orange RSS feed icon was one of those things.

I noticed it from time to time on websites I visited – “subscribe via RSS” would be the invitation. But why would I want to, when I had just filled in the optin form and then confirmed my email address? With all the other stuff vying for my attention, the RSS feed issue just wasn’t compelling enough to make me do something about it.

That is, until I started to focus on my time management (or rather, lack of) skills. Somehow just recently, it has filtered through to my awareness that the bold little orange icon can save me time. Ahha! Now I’m a bit more motivated.

I thought I’d go online and find out all I need to know, and then write a post for my readers – well, that sparkle of inspiration and excitement lasted as long as it took me to google “RSS feeds” and discover that there were 288,000,000 entries! I clicked on the first one, which happened to be Wikipedia, and there was just too much information for this total technophobe!

After a bit more research, I remembered that I can drive my car perfectly well, but I have only a very limited understanding of how it works. After that, I felt much better.

Here, in the tiniest nutshell, is my understanding of RSS feeds:

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” (there are other definitions, but that seems to be the most popular).

From the readers’ point of view, subscribing to RSS feeds allows you to easily have the news/blogposts/information updates that you are interested in sent to one place, where you can access them all on one page without having to visit each site individually.

You need a feed reader. There are many readers, but I have google reader, which seems to be a popular one.
To get google reader, sign in to your google account and select the reader option, or go to http://www.google.com/reader

This page will open.

Play the video. I have read many articles and watched several video clips about RSS feeds, but this little gem, while very short, seems to give as much information as I needed to get started. 

For me, now, it’s a case of using RSS feeds for a while to become familiar with what I can do with them and how they can help me. It’s quite possible I’m the last person online to start learning about that wonderful little orange icon, but if any of you want a good, written tutorial about getting started with RSS feeds, one of the best I found was on Paula Brett’s blog and I recommend you read it and save yourself the hours of research that I have done.

Here’s the link to Paula’s tutorial.