Really Simple RSS

Ever wonder what this icon is all about? It provides a link to a news feed or RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed which is a summary of new articles or blog posts on a website.

Used in combination with a news reader (sometimes called news aggregators) such as Google Reader, it allows you to monitor new items on various websites in which you are interested. So rather than visiting a web site without knowing if there is a new blog post or not, with a news reader, you can visit the website only when there are new posts that interest you.

Here are a couple of videos from Commoncraft which explain how it all works in plain English.

RSS in Plain English

and Google Reader in Plain English

There are many alternatives to Google Reader. For a comprehensive list, see NewsOnFeeds.com's List of Aggregators. Another example of aggregated news feeds is the news section on this website where we list new blog posts from other related webistes.

To grab the latest blog posts from this website, click on the following news feed icon , copy the the URL (web address) from the address bar in your web browser (or just copy it here if you like: http://www.hedgeschool.ie/rss.xml ) and add the feed in your preferred news reader. Really simple!!