By Woody Leonhard

Almost all sufficiently advanced websites these days use RSS — Really Simple Syndication — to keep you notified of the latest information posted on the site.

If you’ve never used an RSS feed — or if you use RSS but don’t know how it works — you’re in for a pleasant surprise.

RSS feeds bring information to you. Instead of making you scour the Web, checking on the latest and greatest news, most established websites feed you short synopses of what they posted.



It’s hard to draw an accurate analogy for RSS feeds, but I like to compare them to a magazine display rack: the front covers of most magazines feature a handful (maybe two handfuls) of short descriptions referring to the content inside. Most of the time, you can glance at the cover of a magazine and tell, more or less, whether it contains anything that interests you.

When you look at a rack of magazines, you’re looking at the distilled contents of dozens or even hundreds of publications. In the course of a few minutes, you can tell from a lot of covers what’s worth a second look.

Now imagine your own personal magazine rack, where you get to choose from the magazines on display. More than that, imagine a rack with rapidly updated content — with the magazine covers announcing the changes.

That, to me, is the essence of RSS feeds. Each website publishes a list of its headlines. Your news reader retrieves those headlines every minute or two and then displays them to you. If you see something you like, click on it, and your browser goes to the article that you clicked.

How websites expose information using RSS

Every news website, most blogs, lots of commercial sites, and even some just-plain-fun sites have RSS feeds. If you have a blog and use any of the major blogging packages — such as WordPress — the RSS feed is built into the site. You don’t have to do anything to create an RSS feed because the blogging software takes care of it automatically.

Here’s how the RSS process works:

1. Website designers who want to keep folks updated via RSS create a specially formatted file — called an RSS feed file — and place it in a preordained location on the website.
   
   
2. When the website has something new to broadcast, it adds a short, new item to the beginning of the RSS feed file and drops the last item off the end.
   
   
3. A program on your computer, called an RSS reader, collects the names of all the sites you want to follow. Telling your RSS reader that you want to follow a site is called subscribing — just as if you were subscribing to a magazine.
   
   
4. Periodically, your RSS reader goes out to see whether anything new is in the RSS feed files and then displays the updated information.
   
   

Really simple, eh?

Using iGoogle to bring in the feeds

You can take your pick of dozens of RSS readers. If you like, you can use the RSS readers built into Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome. Personally, I find all of them intrusive and hard to work with. My personal choice for an RSS reader is a customized page from Google called iGoogle.

Google also has a website, called (confusingly) Google Reader, which can retrieve all your designated RSS feeds. They show up on a webpage in your browser. You might prefer this method, but I’ll stick with iGoogle.

Here’s how to get started with iGoogle:

1. If you don’t already have a Google ID, go to Gmail.com and create a new e-mail account.
   
   
2. Fire up your favorite browser and navigate to iGoogle.com. You see a sign-up page that says Create your own homepage in under 30 seconds. Click your stopwatch.
   
   
3. Check the boxes for any interests that pertain to you (or don’t check any at all, if you don’t want Google to suggest RSS-enabled sites for you), choose a theme (the plain Google theme, the first one, works fine), enter your city and country, then click See your page. Your iGoogle home page appears — it took less than 30 seconds, yes?
   
   
4. You may be a bit underwhelmed by Google’s default choices — Weather, Date & Time, a link to Gmail, another one to YouTube’s recommended video, and CNN.com for news. But be of good cheer; you can get rid of all of them immediately and easily.
   
   
5. In the upper-right corner, click the Sign In link and sign into iGoogle using your Gmail account. That procedure saves your iGoogle page. Any changes made to the page will appear in the future when you sign in to iGoogle again.
   
   
6. Play around with the iGoogle page. See how you can click and drag the individual site feeds (Google calls them gadgets) and locate them anywhere on the page you like. Click the down arrow on the right in the CNN.com gadget. One of the options says Delete This Gadget. Click it. That’s how easy it is to delete an existing feed.
   
   
7. Now look on the right side of the page, near the top, for the Add Stuff link; click it. Google will show you a couple of dozen suggested RSS feeds, er, Gadgets. In the upper-right corner, under Search for Gadgets, you’ll see a white box. Type the name of a site you’re interested in (your favorite news organization, for example) and click Search.
   
   There are other ways to add RSS feeds, which I mention below. So if you can’t find your favorite organization or topic just yet, don’t worry.
   
   
8. When you find a site that you want to add to your iGoogle page, click the box that says Add it now. When you’re finished adding to your list, click the link in the upper-right corner that says Back to Gallery. That’s it! You don’t need to save anything; it’s saved for you, automatically.
   
   

Adding RSS feeds to your iGoogle page

After you have your iGoogle page laid out, it’s easy to add more feeds. Here’s how:

1. Navigate to the site that you want to add to your iGoogle page. If the site has an RSS feed available, you see an orange radio-wave icon or an orange RSS box, sometimes next to the word Subscribe.
   
   
2. Select and copy the address (URL) of the page you want to add to iGoogle.
   
   
3. Now go back to iGoogle.com. On the left, click the link to Add Feed or Gadget — a box appears that says Type or paste the URL below.
   
   
4. Paste the copied URL and click Add. If you did everything correctly, iGoogle will come back with a check mark and the word Accepted (or something similar).
   
   
5. To return to the iGoogle home page, click the Go back to iGoogle home link in the upper-left corner of the Add Feed page. You should now find the new gadget on your home page, where you can click and drag it anywhere you like — or change settings by clicking the drop-down arrow in the upper-right corner.
   
   

Every few minutes, iGoogle reaches out to all the sites on your iGoogle home page and retrieves the latest news from the sites’ RSS feeds.

If you aren’t using RSS feeds to save time hunting information on the Web, this is your golden opportunity to get started. By letting sites push data to you, you can save yourself an enormous amount of time and hassle.

Feedback welcome: Have a question or comment about this story? Post your thoughts, praise, or constructive criticisms in the WS Columns forum.

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