Okay folks. I’m pretty new to this stuff too, so for beginners here’s what RSS is about:

Essentially it is a system of keeping track of information from sites that you like. You get a small summary scrolling along the bottom of the page telling you what the new stuff is on the site. In other words, it’s quite handy.

I keep mine scrolling on The Register, which is a great site for slightly techie news and usually fairly liberal ideas. It’s a bit UK-centric, but picks up on stories from all over the world. One that’s caught my eye today is this Dino missing link about a link in the evolutionary chain being filled. Ya boo sucks to evolutionists, or whatever it is the Americans say… My point is that I probably wouldn’t have visited the site and found a story that I’m actually very interested in, and that’s the point of RSS.

So, I know you’re begging to know, how do I get RSS working?

Well, I use Firefox to browse the web (more on that in a future post I’m sure) so I use this extension:

InfoRSS

They even provide it at a nice https domain too. Aren’t they good? It runs along the bottom of your browser window. Here’s one for your weird Internet Explorer people:

RSSreader

I have no idea if that’s any good because, like I say, I use Firefox so don’t need it.

Anyway, while looking at my blog, click whatever you need to to add RSS feeds and they should automatically pick up the options on my page. With the Firefox extension that I linked to, the way to do this is click the little orange square with white swooshes at the bottom of your screen near the RSS feed. You’ll get a few options; I suggest using the RSS 2.0, which is the feed of posts I make, but there’s one on there for comments too, and another one using Atom, which I have no idea about but it came with the software so I’ll leave it on 🙂

So, that’s RSS. Isn’t it nice?

Three posts in one day. This blogging thing could be addictive.

[additional note: while writing this I have drunk a very tasty bottle of ale, and only now noticed that it was 6.4% alcohol, so now my fingers have gone slightly tingly]