A whole lot of websites and blogs offer RSS feed subscription to visitors these days. Amazingly, few people outside the world of blogging and web designing know what’s the fuss with this orange button

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which really isn’t that simple a term to understand. For the layman, clicking on that orange ‘RSS subscription button’ allows you to subscribe to the website’s or blog’s feed, which means that as soon as the blog is updated with new posts you get it instantly in your feed reader. I use Google Reader – a web based feed reader – to manage my many many site subscriptions. Of course, many websites will also give you the option to subscribe to their feed via email, which is the easiest and the most tradional method.

However, the advantages of subscribing to a blog in a feed reader are as follows:

1. You wont mix your important emails with your favourite blogs

2. You can easily, sort, categroize and prioritize all your rss subscriptions in a feed reader.

3. Its cooler.

There are so many great blogs and sites out there, and I feel i ought to be regularly updated with their feeds. Following are some of the RSS feeds that I subscribe to:

• India Uncut blog
• Digital Inspiration
• CNET news
• BBC World
• Journalism.co.uk news

Of course, there are many more, but htese are the ones whose updates I regularly follow. Its always nice to be in the loop. For me, ignorance isn’t bliss.

PS: Do subscribe to Lughole.net RSS feed i you enjoyed this post :)

This icon set was designed by Dirceu Veiga from Brazil for the Smashing Magazine.

It contains 8 icons which you can use for private and commercial projects, blogs and web-sites for free. The icons are available for both Mac and Win-users in resolutions 16×16px, 24×24px, 32×32px, 48×48px, 128×128px, 256×256px and 512×512px. Download links are at the bottom of the post.

Newbies often wonder – what is RSS?

Well, RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

Benefits of RSS

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually.

More about RSS
RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved since March 1999,[4] the RSS icon first gained widespread use in 2005/2006.