What is RSS?

Do you get tired of roaming to all your favorite Web sites and blogs, one after the other, to see if there is something new there? If you’re like me, sometimes you forget about sites you liked altogether. You could subscribe to newsletters, but maybe you are also tired of newsletters filling your Inbox. Well, I’m happy to tell you that there is a Really Simple remedy for this time-wasting exercise. You can very easily set up a place where you can check all your Web sites at once.

You may have seen the initials “RSS” but at that point, your eyes moved on down the page. But the first two initials of RSS stand for “Really Simple” – and it is! This is all you have to do:

1. Go to one of a number of special Web sites, called RSS readers.
2. Set up an account.
3. Plug in your favorite Web sites.

That’s it! Whenever you go back to your RSS reader, you can look at your list of favorite sites and see how many new items have been posted to that site, with descriptions of each item. So you don’t need to go to the site itself unless you know it has something you think you’ll be interested in. It’s such a time-saver!

If you’d like you can put RSS reading software on your computer, or add one to certain Web browsers, such as Firefox. For beginners, though, I think Web-based RSS readers are the easiest way. Some of the more popular ones are on My Yahoo and Bloglines. Personally, I think Bloglines is the easiest to use of the ones I’ve tried.

To subscribe to the RSS feed of this site (About’s Low Carb Diets Site), go to Bloglines (or other site) and register. Then add www.lowcarbdiets.about.com to your list. Probably several RSS feeds will come up, and at that point it doesn’t matter – they all do the same thing, just click on one of them.

Tip: Large Web sites often have multiple RSS feeds. For example, I subscribe to the Health and Science Feeds of the New York Times, and I just get those updates.