What is RSS?

Despite its unfriendly jargon-o-rific name, RSS is actually a very friendly and useful little chappie.

Depending on who you talk to, it stands for Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication, and very rarely as Rather Suspicious Stephen, but that’s unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

Essentially RSS allows regularly changing web content to be delivered to whoever chooses to subscribe to it. In other words, if you choose to subscribe to an RSS feed of say, the news on this site, then the news will be delivered straight to you, and save you the journey of coming all the way to the site to see if it has been updated or not.

You can subscribe to RSS feeds in various ways with a selection of tools and applications, and it’s fairly likely that something you already use has an RSS reading ability built in. Check out this big ol’ list on Wikipedia.