What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and you can find more information about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Have you ever wished that you could get an idea of what's going on around the world without actually having to visit twenty or thirty different web sites? For example, you could visit all of the major news providers' web sites to find out what's going on, or you could use an RSS aggregator to access their RSS feeds. This would allow you to browse headlines and/or snippets of the latest news articles from all of those providers without visiting their web sites.

You can use the Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader) to track a number of information sources, and with it, you can also keep track of the blogs hosted here. you'll have to give an email address and set a password to use it, but you'll gain access to an extremely powerful tool to stay abreast of what's happening in the world.

When you subscribe to an RSS feed with a utility such as Google Reader, you can gather news or other information from a lot (hundreds, if you so desired) of web sites and then just check one place to see what's new.

If you're using Firefox (http://getfirefox.com), check the address bar when visiting the Kingdom Men blog page and look for the orange RSS icon. Right-click on this and select "preview feed". Then copy the URL from the address bar and go back to Google Reader. Click the "Add subscription" link in green, and paste the feed's URL into the text field, and click 'Add'.

If you're using IE7, you should get Firefox. But if you really don't want to, just check the tool bar at the window when you're viewing the Kingdom Men blog page. You should see the same RSS icon. Left click on the icon and from here the process to add it to Google Reader is exactly the same.

If you'd like to track other news sources with Google Reader, click the 'Browse >>' link in the green. This will allow you to browse and search through all of the RSS feeds that Google has in their databases. You can find all sorts of things there, so explore.

Google has a pretty decent help section if you have questions about how to use Google Reader. But, now you can can just go to a single web site to track information from as many as you want.

One final comment. Often times, web sites that produce a huge quantity of stories, such as news sites, often times have categories for news, and separate news feeds for each category. For example, Engadget (http://engadget.com) has 30 categories, each with their own feeds. So if you wanted to get just news about Robots, you could subscribe to that category feed here: (http://www.engadget.com/feeds/)