There is a clickable legend on the sidebar of my blog which says Entries RSS . What is that? Should you care?

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary. This is a format that delivers regularly changing web content to subscribers automatically. News related sites, weblogs and other online publishers find this tool very useful for delivering their content to their readers via the RSS feed.

What is there in it for you? RSS feeds can solve a problem for you if you regularly follow my blog. You will be automatically informed the moment I put in new content. This will save you the trouble of visiting my site everytime and will also ensure your privacy–you do not have to join the site’s email newsletter or register with the site. This technology is becoming very popular as more and more sites are offering you RSS feeds.

What do you need for reading a RSS feed? There are several feed readers that can be downloaded and used to read the feed. But, what happens if you subscribe to RSS feeds in more than one site? There are News aggregator software that allow you to grab the RSS feed from various sites and display them for you.  A few examples of feed readers are: Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows – integrates with Outlook). Web based feed readers include:My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader.

Once you have your feedreader installed, all you need to do is to add the RSS feed of the sites you are interested in to the list of feeds in the feed reader. The feed reader then automatically checks the sites for new content and displays them on your reader for you.

So, if you are interested in subscribing to the RSS feed on this site, click on the link and keep up with my posts!