For those of you who don’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is for many people an essential part of their daily online routine.

A lot of websites that have regularly updating content (like Gamblz.com!) have an RSS feed, they are usually easy to find - look for the orange RSS icon, or just a link that says ‘RSS’… some recent browsers automatically detect RSS feeds and display the icon in the address bar.

What can you do with an RSS feed?

An RSS feed is just an XML file that is constantly publishing the websites content so that you can make use of it in external applications. The most common way is to use an RSS reader to aggregate all the RSS feeds you’re interested in and have them push that information to you in way that you find convenient. Subscribing to an RSS feed means that you don’t need to visit the website to read their content… think of it as a ‘home delivery’ service.

Here is the RSS Feed for Gamblz.com

This video, put together by the team at CommonCraft will give you a good idea about what RSS can do to make your online time easier.

You’ll need to get yourself a free RSS reader, here are two I recommend:

FeedDemon - Desktop application that syncs via the web (so that you can access your data on multiple computers)… this is what I use, great program.
Google Reader - Web based reader (access your data from any computer just by using your Google account), has some additional ’share’ features that make it a popular choice.