RSS Feeds

What is an RSS Feed? What are those icons? Why do I see those icons all over the place? How can I use RSS feeds?

If you have ever asked yourself any of those questions, hopefully this post is for you. From Wikipedia, RSS is:

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format.

What does that mean? Basically RSS is a way for websites to publish content so anyone can “grab” the most recent entries to read them. This means that you don’t necessarily need to visit a website to get the most recent content – you can use the RSS feed. Just about every site nowadays has an RSS feed. IF you are using Firefox, you can easily see if a site has an RSS feed by looking at the far right of the address bar. If you see the standard RSS feed icon, the site has an RSS feed. Just click on the icon to view the RSS feed.

Did you click on the icon? Did you get a weird page that you were not sure how to read? That’s ok – you rarely need to look at the RSS feed directly like that. Instead, one of the easiest ways to view RSS feeds is through Google Reader, an RSS Aggregator. You can tell Google Reader what RSS feeds you want to “subscribe” to, and then Google Reader will always show you the most recent content from all of your feeds. You could stop going to websites all together and use Google Reader for all your internet browsing. There will be more posts on Google Reader here, so check back (via our RSS feeds below).

shortsleep provides two RSS feeds for your use:

Blog Posts
Comments

Feel free to subscribe to the feeds via your RSS Aggregator.