How RSS works

Or, how this site/page can help you best:

It is probably best to subscribe to this page using a RSS reader to keep up to date with system statuses. You could also bookmark the page, but using RSS gives you a lot more power to keep track of things, and maybe even have your reader notify you via email or a popup in your computer's system tray (depending on the reader you are using). Using RSS is very cool and hard to avoid on the web these days--ultimately it could make your life a lot easier.

Basic idea. Instead of running all over the web for news, updates, etc... you can have the web come to you. It's sort of your own personal news service. Let's say, you like to read the New York Times, business section, and you also like to read about high performance car articles from Car and Driver Magazine. Addtionally, you like to read a few blogs out there that you are a fan of. So, you just go to your RSS reader, and then you would see all updates from all of those diffrent sites, all on your single page--you see, it's your own portal to the web.

As you can see, it's very time sensitive, or time oriented information that RSS really is used for the most. But even sites like Ebay and Amazon often let you subscribe to RSS feeds to watch certain products and product updates.

But how do you setup an RSS reader, or should I say subscribe to an RSS feed ? It's easy even for most people that are afraid of the internet and other crazy technologies.

If you use Internet Explorer (the blue "E") to get online and browse the internet, then you can read it here on Microsofts website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/tour/rss/
In short, any site you are visiting, you should see a little orange symbol in your browsers toolbar somewhere.

If you use Firefox, then try this to get started (they call theirs "Live Bookmarks"):
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/livebookmarks.html

Most email clients/programs like Outlook (2007), Eudora, and Thunderbird have readers built into them (use their documentation to learn how).

If you use Google Desktop, there is one there that even notifies you, or even your Google/MSN/Yahoo homepage can all be customized to show RSS feeds for other sites.

There are also plenty of other free (and commercial) programs out there--they are getting hard to avoid these days. You can do a google search, or a search on Download.com for "RSS reader" or "RSS aggregator" or "news aggregator." But I would really count on most of the ones I mentinoed previously, especially the ones that can auto-notify you.