If you’re like me, you don’t care about RSS, and you’re sick of hearing everybody talk about it. It’s like some ridiculously elaborate secret club that only web geeks know about and won’t explain to anybody else. Well, just this week, I decide to break this aggravating code, and I discovered that hey, RSS is kind of cool. If you have a collection of bookmarked sites that you read regularly, you might like it too.

Instead of visiting ten different websites and blogs in the morning, imagine if there was a way to read them all in the same place, and see which ones have been updated at a glance. That’s RSS. You subscribe to websites, and the content from the sites comes to you, and instead of you having to visit the site. Unlike magazines, the subscriptions are free. To borrow a metaphor often used by Google, it’s like an email inbox for the web.

These days, most websites use XML, which is a programming language that keeps the content and the design separate from one another. So an “RSS feed” is just the website content, without the design.

What can you do with an RSS feed? The most important thing is you can organize them in a “reader.” That’s the “email inbox for the web” I mentioned. I recommend Google Reader, partially because it’s super easy, and partially because it’s the only one I’ve tried.

Here’s a shot of the main screen when I sign into my Google Reader. On the left are the sites I subscribe to. It’s currently showing JUST the sites that have fresh content. (Click for a larger view)

Here is a closer look at the sidebar. As you can see, I’ve got my subscriptions sorted into categories. If I click “All,” I can view all the sites I subscribe to, not just the updated ones.

When I click on the site name, the new posts from that site appear on the right. I can read the post right there, without visiting the site. (Click for a larger view)

If you have a Google account, you already have Google Reader. You should try it out now. Here’s what do:

1. Visit the Google Reader login screen, at http:///reader.google.com
2. Login using your Google username and password.
3. Add your first subscription.
4. You’re ready!

When you find a site you want to subscribe to, just check for the orange icon.This is the standard icon for identifying a website that has content you can subscribe to. It looks like this:

If there is no icon, there might be a link that says something like “Subscribe in a reader” or “RSS (Entries). ” Copy that link, click on “Add Subscription,” and paste it into the subscription box:

If you already use RSS, or if you’re about to, I’d love it if you subscribed to my sites:
RSS feed for Kevan Gilbert Online: http://feeds.feedburner.com/KevanGilbertOnline
RSS feed for Elbowruminations: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Elbowruminations

(Afterword: RSS used to stand for “rich site summary.” But somebody decided that didn’t make sense, so now it stands for “really simple syndication.” But that still sounds confusing. I think the abbreviation should be DSS: Direct Site Subscription.)