RSS Feeds have been around for quite some time now, but believe it or not I have only just figured out what they are all about. I must admit I never really researched into them too much, and I got the idea that it’s a way for you to view updates from certain websites.

For those of you, like me who are unsure of what RSS is all about here’s a rough idea. Modern web browsers all support RSS, and if the website is set up to provide RSS you will notice a little symbol showing this, for Safari it is in the left hand side of the address bar. If you click on this link it will open up a fairly bland looking page with all of that websites posts.

Ok so this isn’t too exciting and well if that was it’s only purpose it wouldn’t really be very significant and this is as far as I had thought to look into RSS until now. Now I haven’t had the chance to look into this on Windows because I live in a Mac filled house, but I gather it would be a similar situation for PC’s. Essentially the great thing about RSS is that it enables you to gather blog post updates and website posts all in one place – your email client or an RSS Reader.

I just love the idea of being able to open up you mail program and as your email downloads, so does all of the new posts on your favourite blogs and websites. Essentially this means that all you have to do is set up you RSS Reader to catch your site of interest and viola you will no longer need to bookmark/remember/google all of your favourite websites and spend all that time navigating around the web just to catch up on all your internet news for the day. After all isn’t computing all about making our lives easier?

Want to get your RSS feeds underway? Check out these tools:

NetNewsWire – For Mac

FeedDemon – For Windows

For mac you can also use Mail or on Windows you can use Outlook 2007. Otherwise I would try Googling RSS Reader to find one that suits you best.