WHAT IS RSS ? Subscribe to the Blazing Saddle Syndication by Email

The Blazing Saddle content is all viewable through RSS Feeds (Really Simple Syndication).So, what is RSS? You already know the web pages you like to visit – you probably have them in your browser's "Favorites". However, it is not easy to tell when they've been updated without visiting each one and checking. Computers, though, can tell when sites have been updated, using a feed.

An RSS feed is usually made up of a number of titles and short summaries of full content on the web site that produced the feed. In other words, you can quickly look at the summaries and, at a glance, tell if you want to click through and visit the full version on the web site. Plus, your computer will let you know when a new feed is available. And that's what an RSS feed is – a summary of the latest content on a web site so that you can see whether there is anything new or interesting available.

It is so popular because it makes keeping up to date with the sites you like quick and easy.

What can I do with feeds?

So, once you've found one or more RSS feeds you want to subscribe to so you can keep up to date with their content, what’s next? What you need is a way of grouping your feeds together and displaying them so you can see them all in one place. There are several ways of doing this, which one you choose really depends on which you find easiest. All the different ways of using feeds usually offer some things in common:

a. a way of subscribing to feeds – pointing to the location, like a web site address, where all the up-to-date feed content will be available
b. a way of displaying all the feeds you have subscribed to
c. a way of telling you which feeds have new content in them
d. a way of following links back to the full content on the web site

Lots of different companies offer separate downloadable programs (often called 'desktop readers') that will do most of the above and some web sites (often called 'web-based readers') and even some web browsers (Safari, Firefox 2.0, IE 7) will read and present RSS feeds too.

How do I use feeds?

1. Choose a feed reader you want to use. You may need to set up a user account. Go to reader.google.com to get started.

2. Find the RSS feed you are interested in subscribing to, in this case the Blazing Saddle RSS Feed .

3. Subscribe to the feed - follow the directions on the Google Reader site .

4. Check your feed reader regularly to see if there is any new or interesting content.

5. When you find something you want to know more about click the link in the reader to go straight to the page in your browser.

6. And that's it! Of course, you can repeat the subscription step for all the other feeds you are interested in.

Don't want to use RSS Feeds?

Subscribe to the Blazing Saddle Syndication by Email