RSSHi friends,

I have someone new to introduce to you today. His name is RSS and you’re just going to love him.

Who is RSS?

Okay, so he’s not a handsome hunk. In fact, RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. But here’s what you need to know about it.

Think of your favorite websites. Got it? Yeah, you’re thinking about CN Readers’ Lounge, I knew it! How do you know when we post something new to our website? You have to come and visit the site to see if something new has been posted, right? Or we might send out an email mentioning new posts. Right?

RSS makes it really easy for you to be notified each time something new is posted to one of your favorite sites or blogs.

How does RSS work?

Well, first, you have to subscribe to the site/blog’s RSS feed. It looks like a web address but with a few key things on there.

How do you subscribe?

You need a Feed Reader. I personally use Google Reader. It’s free and insanely easy to use. But there are LOTS of options. Even my email software allows me to get RSS feeds.

Once you have an RSS reader that you like, you add RSS feeds to it. The reader then “calls” the websites every so often and asks “hey, got any new content.” If the site says “sure do, here it is!” then the content will pop up in your RSS reader for you to read.

Here’s a screenshot of my Google Reader (just so you’ll see it’s not at all scary.)

reader.gif

So, who has an RSS feed for you to put in your reader?

LOTS OF FOLKS!

For starters:

  • Romancing the Blog
  • eHarlequin
  • DearAuthor
  • RomanticTimes blog
  • SingleTitles.com and all the other CataNetwork sites
  • Virtually every blog on the internet

Yeah, we thought those looked familiar.

There’s one more thing I should mention. RSS has a cousin called Atom. Atom was developed by Google. But it does pretty much the same thing as RSS. So if you’re over on blogger and you see something that says Atom, you can grab that feed just like an RSS feed. But, make sure your Feed Reader will “play nice” with both RSS and Atom.

Now, go get your Feed Reader set up and GRAB OUR FEED!

Care for another? (aka random posts)