I realised a few days ago how much the way I use the internet has changed since the widespread availability of RSS feeds, and thought it might be useful to do a post on why they’re so good. So if you haven’t got a clue what’s so great about the little orange icon, read on…

RSS is basically a way for websites to provide their content in a standard manner. Nothing too exciting there; you get a list of ‘articles’ in a feed, with each one linking to the website page which it relates to. The ‘article’ in the feed can be either the full story from the website, or just a summary.

You can view RSS feeds in browsers, email clients or specialised RSS reader programs. All feeds are presented in a standard format – this will vary slightly depending on the program you use to view the feed, but is generally clutter-free and easy to use. You can tell whether a website has an RSS feed because it will either have a link somewhere on the page called “RSS”, “Atom” or “Feed”, or may show the RSS icon:

Alternatively, you browser may tell you when it detects that a page has an RSS feed associated with it. For example, Safari puts a little “RSS” icon in the right-hand end of the address bar, which I can then click on to view the feed:

The good bit about feeds is that they are updated automatically each time new content is added to a website. Using the BBC News as an example, we can see that the RSS feed for the front page shows us the news stories:

When the stories on the website are updated, the feed updates to reflect this. Next time you view the feed, the new stories appear at the top:

That’s pretty interesting, because if you have a feed covering an entire website, you can see all the new content in one place, quickly and easily. You don’t have to hunt through menus and check various sections of the site. But the real power of RSS, for me, is shown when you bookmark a feed. I have lots of RSS feeds bookmarked in the toolbar at the top of Safari:

Although they look just like normal bookmarks, the beauty of RSS is that each time a feed is updated, Safari lets me know by putting the number of new articles in brackets after the bookmark:

If I click on the “Climbing” folder to see the bookmarks within it, you can see that Safari also shows me which feeds have been updated:

IE does a similar thing – it just highlights new stories in bold rather than putting the number of new stories after the title:

If I click on the bookmark to view the feed, and I get to see the new content. What that means is that the websites I’m interested in basically come and tell me when they have something new added. I don’t have to trawl through all of my favourite websites each day to make sure I’m not missing anything, and I don’t get exposed to any advertising because no-one advertises in their RSS feeds (yet!).

I’ve got loads of feeds bookmarked, with general news from climbing and biking websites, feeds which tell me when someone comments on this blog, feeds that allow me to see when any of my friends have been climbing, and to be told each time my uni mountaineering club website gets updated. You’ll find feeds all over the place – you can be told about new posts in forums, for example. The key thing here is to let the internet come to you, instead of you having to chase around all over the place trying to keep up with what’s going on.

So go on, try it out. You can view the RSS feed for this blog here. Alternatively, if you’re only interested in one particular category of things I post, there are RSS feeds for those too (Gigs, Outdoors, for example). The stuff I’ve described above works exactly the same in Internet Explorer 8 (not sure about IE7), but I can’t be bothered booting up the Windows machine to get the screenshots. If any of the above has just confused you, there’s a decent guide to RSS on the BBC website here.