If you’ve read enough blogs, you’ve probably heard of feeds or RSS and seen a lot of those little orange logos like you see here on the top right. This post, however, is for all of you who may be new to the world of blogging and aren’t entirely sure what a blog feed is and why everyone is asking you to subscribe.

What exactly is an RSS feed?

RSS is a form of content syndication commonly known as Really Simple Syndication. This is also what is referred to as a feed or blog feed. The format is specified with XML which you can read more about at Wikipedia if you’re interested. The purpose of these feeds is so that you can keep up with your favorite sites automatically and all in one place by using a reader.

What exactly is a reader?

You’ll always be asked to subscribe to someone’s feed and to do this you need something that will read it. The software that accomplishes this is an aggregator or what’s commonly to referred to just as a feed reader. These aren’t anything complicated and most of them are free to use. In fact, you can use Google’s feed reader for free, and it’s already integrated with your existing Gmail account.

In order to subscribe to a website’s feed, you just need to click on the RSS logo or other feed link and then choose the reader that you have. It will then add the feed’s content to your reader along with everything else that you subscribe to. This way you’ll only need to go to one place to read all of your favorite websites instead of having to visit each site one by one. You can also have the feed delivered to your email address if you’d rather go that route.

Give it a shot.

So now that you know what all this feed talk is about, you ought to check out either Google’s feed reader or any other reader. They’re really easy to use and you can organize the different feeds into categories however you’d like. And this wouldn’t be much of a post if I didn’t put a plug in for my own feed that you can subscribe to above or at the link here at the bottom of this post. You’ll get to be reminded all the time to save and invest and learn to improve your finances.

Also, if you’ve got any other questions about the blogging arena, I’ll do my best to answer it or at least point you in the right direction to someone who can.

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