Imagine getting updates from your favorite web sites delivered directly into your mail inbox. No more having to visit those sites in your browser to find interesting articles. With RSS those “feeds” of information come to you.  You “subscribe” to a feed and then get article summaries to view, almost like email messages. You decide if you want to visit that site or not.  All you need is an RSS “reader” (and for Mac OS X users, one is already built in.)

So by now you may be asking, “what is RSS?” Most commonly it stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a special format of XML (Extensible Markup Language) in which all the data is wrapped in tags. These tags allow the data to be understood very easily, which has allowed RSS to flourish worldwide.

For website owners who write content on their site, publishing RSS feeds can be just another path or channel to their site.  And now, many CMS (Content Management Systems) and blog software have RSS feed publishing built in, so there’s nothing extra you as the site owner have to do.  WordPress sites, for example, are some of the easiest ways to have RSS feeds running for all “posts,” or “news updates.”

Sound interesting? Let’s see how easy it is to subscribe to the HMAUS feed in my three step process.

Step 1: Find the feed. On sites with RSS feeds there are usually two places to look; 1) the address bar of your browser, or 2) a button mentioning RSS/Subscribe. Here’s an example with the HMAUS web site showing both of them:

Once you find one of them, simply click on the that link and copy the feed URL (control-c).

Step 2: Add it to Mail. Once you have the feed URL, go to Apple’s Mail program and click File and “Add RSS Feed.”

If you did step 1 correctly and are connected to the Internet, Mail should find the feed and populate it for you. Whenever there is an update, you’ll be notified, just like you are with email.

Step 3: That’s it! You’re done. Let the best of the web come to you!

Now, what if you don’t like Mail or want fancier features? Well, there are plenty of other RSS readers. Desktop apps include free open-source Vienna, free NetNewsWire that syncs with Google Reader, and Times, a beautiful, newspaper-like reader.  For online readers, you can use Google Reader or MyYahoo to name just two.

What other feeds are out there? Most major sites now have RSS feeds available; CNN, NYTimes, MacWorld, and Honolulu Advertiser. Remember to check your favorite sites for feed icons, and you can also subscribe to the HMAUS Twitter feed for real-time updates.

That’s really just scratching the surface of RSS.  If you’d like to know more, or have some great feed suggestions, let us know.