What It Means to Subscribe to the Feed and Why You Should Do It

It’s very possible that you have no idea what I and other bloggers mean when we ask you to subscribe to our RSS feed, so I want to take a minute to explain.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it enables you to get all the latest information from all your favorite websites in one location so that you don’t have to visit each and every website individually. Subscribing to a blog’s feed is very much like subscribing to a magazine or a newspaper…a website’s new content is delivered to your RSS Reader when it becomes available.

So yes, you need a free account with an RSS Reader. Some popular ones include Google Reader, Bloglines, and Newsgator. Another option for keeping up with your feeds is corralling them at Netvibes, a personal Internet start page. This is what I do and I will go into detail about this service in the next few days.

How do you subscribe to blogs? Here at living a LuSHHus life, for example, all you have to do is click the "Get the LuSHHus Feed" link in the right sidebar. You could also click the RSS icon in the address bar next to the LuSHHus URL (this does not work in all browsers but it does in Firefox which is what I use.)

Subscribing to feeds makes a lot of sense because doing so allows you to keep up with many websites without having to visit each site one at a time and without having to remember which blogs you really want to read. Subscribing also prevents you from continually checking blogs that haven’t updated. I hope this explanation helps those of you who needed more information on the matter, and please feel free to ask questions if you have any.

Cheers!