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CommonCraft does an excellent job of explaining RSS, but here is a quick guide for anyone who doesn’t want to sit through the video.

  • RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a way of taking content (feeds) from multiple sites you enjoy and putting them in one place (a feed reader) to read at your own pace.
  • Think of it as your own personalized newspaper.
  • You can recognize a site with an RSS feed, by looking for an orange chicklet, like the kind you see in my sidebar.
  • When you click on it, you’ll be presented with a ton of different options, representing dozens of feed readers.
  • For the sake of our example, try adding this feed to Google Reader.
  • After you fill out their sign-in form (assuming you’re not a member), you’ll notice all of this site’s content is now available to you on the Google Reader page.
  • You can add any number of sites to your reader and come back anytime to see all the newest content without the hassle of going to the site itself.

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