Syndication and RSS Feeds
An RSS feed is a way for people to receive notification when a site is updated and to read the content of a site without having to visit it.
An RSS file (or feed) is a simple XML file designed to be viewed by an application called a newsreader or news aggregator. There are loads of good newsreaders out there, including NetNewsWire for OS X and FeedDemon for Windows. There are also online newsreaders such as Bloglines.
I have two RSS feeds for this site. The first one provides you with the last 10 entries (with pictures) to this site, while the second provide you with the last 10 links added to my links section. To subscribe to one of these feeds, simply click and drag the link to your newsreader program.
If you are using an online service just copy the target of the link, don't actually visit the link as it'll take you to a page that probably won't make a lot of sense.
RSS stands either for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication depending who you listen to. There are essentially 2 common formats, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. Despite their names, they are actually two different formats rather than different versions of the same format. However most newsreaders understand both formats so it shouldn't matter which one you use. there is also a new type of feed called Atom, however several popular newsreaders don't support this format, so I don't use it on this site.
If you'd like to learn more about RSS feeds have a look at this RSS article at xml.com or check out the book by Ben Hammersley entitled Content Syndication with RSS.
