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If you want to know what I’m talking about without coming back here, then subscribe using Google, Bloglines, Newsgator, Netvibes, or any other aggregator via RSS. You can even use email.
If you use different aggregators or just want to see what options you have, click here and you’ll be taken to a page giving you exactly the options you need.
Also feel free to subscribe to the other newsfeeds on the right-hand sidepanel which are aggregated and syndicated through Google Reader especially for you.
But what is all this subscription nonsense anyway?
Once upon a time, websites stood alone. Then search engines came along and indexed them. This was an improvement in that you could find the websites, but you still had to go out and look at them to see if they’d changed at all.
Websites then started changing much more quickly, especially blogs. It became impossible to track all the changes. So, someone clever introduced a technology that told you when a website or blog had changed, and, even better than that, sent the content through to you without you having to go to it.
This technology is called RSS. Before you panic, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a feed, in the same way you would have a financial feed if you were a trader, or a weather feed if you were a Met Office staff member failing once more to predict the latest weather-related disaster to befall the UK.
So, when a website or blog is updated, the feed sends – syndicates – that content out. You can subscribe to that feed and receive the content at your end. It is really simple.
To subscribe, you just need an RSS reader. I use Google Reader because it’s cool, it’s free, you don’t need to install anything and you can use it wherever you are. You can also do all sorts of clever stuff with it, such as create your own feeds and share them with other people. That’s what the links and feeds are all about to the right hand side of this blog. They take a lot of feeds and syndicate them out as one feed.
This video might explain it a bit better:
