RSS Feeds

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication.  You can use an RSS feed to keep updated on your favorite websites.  Instead of bookmarking a site and having to go out to each of your favorite sites manually for updated content, you can use an RSS feed to do all the work for you.  An RSS feed will list the latest posts as clickable headlines on your reader application. 

Google Reader was a very popular RSS reader but is now defunct.  I went on a search for another good website and found http://digg.com/reader.  I used the website to put together a quick sample of this technology.  One can either add a website to your RSS feed by the URL or you can browse categories on digg reader and add suggested pages.  I took about two minutes to add several websites from the browsed categories and this is what my digg reader now looks like:

 I can click on each headline, and view an article, sometime in its entirety, like for this NPR article:

For some sites, a summary of the article comes up, and one can click on the article again to be redirected to the site.

 

This can be a quick, valuable way to catch up on information and news that is personally important to you.  I, for one, am going to start using this technology more to streamline the influx of information I get from my social media feeds.

-Katie Eckert