On the next page, we'll take a look at how the format got its start and what it was designed to do. To which should you subscribe? When you choose one of them, what happens next?ĭon't get discouraged and quit, though - once you learn how to use news feeds, you'll save time by scanning headlines from your favorite sites. Some sites have multiple feeds for the same page with different versions of RSS or a competing standard, Atom. Click on one, though, and you'll get a list of options which may seem a little intimidating if you don't know what they mean. Those emblems show the presence of active RSS feeds on a site to help you get started. Safari shows a blue rectangle with 'RSS' written in white letters. You'll see a similar symbol in Internet Explorer's toolbar.

Firefox and Opera display the now-common square orange badge for a Web feed in the browser's address bar when they find RSS feeds on a site. Some Web-browsing software automatically detects RSS feeds. Sometimes you'll even spot more headlines that you might never have seen buried on the original page.ĭon't feel badly if you haven't heard of RSS - you may have already come into contact with it without knowing its name. This lets you scan the articles on the page more efficiently. When you subscribe, you'll get a feed - often a series of headlines and brief summaries - of all the articles published on that particular Web page.

What does an rss feed do