First off, what is an RSS feed? I think I understand it, but I’m not sure. Also, how do I subscribe to an RSS feed and why would I want to?

This is a wonderful question, because it’s one I have heard time and again from people. So let’s have a stab at this…

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s basically a computer-readable summary of the content of a Web page. This summary might be just the headlines of the articles on the page, the headlines plus a sentence or two excerpt of the articles, or even the headlines plus the entire articles. These are known as “headline only”, “headline + excerpt” and “full text” feeds, respectively.

There are, of course, nuances, because RSS is now used for…