For many months, I saw these strange buttons marked things like "RSS" or "XML" on different sites, but did not know what they were. When I clicked on then, I got a bunch of what looked like HTML code in my browser window -- not useful. I eventually got around to caring enough about what they were to figure it out, and thought I would write it up here. Note -- this is not an explanation of what RSS is, it's just some quick and dirty notes about how you can use it.

Those mysterious RSS tags are never meant to be clicked on. The URLs behind them are supposed to be added to a "news aggregator" of some kind. "News aggregators" are like special purpose browsers just for these RSS feeds, and let you read many sites without having to go to every site. While there are some websites that act like news aggregators, I don't think they work very well and would recommend you download one. Mark Pilgrim recommends Amphetadesk for Windows users and NetNewsWire Lite for Mac OS X users

Once you've downloaded a client, click on the RSS link just to get the URL and cut and paste it into the client. Now you are subscribed to that feed and any new content should automatically appear in the client.

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