What is RSS?

RSS—originally Rich Site Summary but now more often said to mean Really Simple Syndication—is an easy way for Web sites to distribute summaries of what is available. An RSS news feed has a list of the latest headlines that are linked to the full article; clicking on the headline will open the full story on the Web. For more on the Workers World RSS news feed read the following article: www.workers.org/2005/us/rss/

What do I need to use RSS?

To start using RSS, you need a news reader that displays RSS headlines from Web sites you select. The easiest to use RSS news reader is the one built into the Mozilla Firefox Web browser. Firefox is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems. You can get Firefox from Mozilla. Firefox puts RSS news feeds into its bookmarks, where the headlines can be easily displayed and selected for viewing the full article. Firefox calls these Live Bookmarks. The instructions for Live Bookmarks are here.

The Thunderbird email reader, also from Mozilla, has an RSS newsreader built in. Thunderbird is used like Outlook Express and is a popular replacement because of its advanced junk mail filter. In Thunderbird, an account can be set up for RSS News & Blogs that will let you then subscribe to RSS feeds and read them in the email program. Full instructions can be found here.

An easy-to-use standalone RSS newsreader is FeedReader, which is GNU licensed, meaning it is 100% free. It works in Windows 95 and later versions.

There are also many other standalone news readers available. For a Google list of news readers go here.