You probably go around the net every day and visit a variety of your favorite sites. You get to these websites on a daily basis to learn about news updates, and read new articles and contents. By your conventional internet method you have to get to your favorite sites from a bookmark, or by remembering the website url. Once you reach the site, you don't know if any news item or article has been posted since your last visit. In order to find this out you have to search through a set of pages which may contain a number of articles and topics in which you are probably not interested. After searching through all these pages you may find out that no new articles or news items were posted since your last visit to that site.

You come back to the same site at a later time to see if a new article is posted this time. Now imagine a way by which by the click of your mouse button you get a list of all the updates with heading and a short description that has occurred in your favorite website since your last visit. Better still would be to have the ability to go directly to the updated page of your interest by clicking on the updated notice link. Also imagine that you are getting this update list not from one of your favorite sites, but from all your favorite websites. Just imagine how much time and effort you could save by having this convenience of updated information delivered to your desktop. Now stop imagining, it is really possible to do it with today's technology and that is RSS. RSS feed is an xml format based web page that allows the syndication (distributing news headlines) of lists of hyperlinks, along with a short description and other relevant information, or metadata that helps viewers decide whether they want to follow the link and view the contents.

An RSS reader or RSS aggregator read the information from the RSS feeds that you have specified and present it on your computer in a systematic list like format. All the new additions to the site of your interested will be visible and you decide which page to go and read the article. In other words all the new information on your favorite website can be tracked, organized and personalized. An RSS feed is just like any other web page or web file on the server. An RSS feed may also be called a channel. A regular web page may be written in variety of available formats including html, htm, asp, php, pl, cgi and more. An RSS feed is generally written in xml format. Once a website set up an RSS feed or channel your RSS reader can regularly fetch the xml file your computer and analyze it to obtain the most recent information on the website. RSS reader manages many lists from a number of websites with RSS feeds that you have specified and presents them in a single list like interface.

RSS readers or aggregators are used to get the updated information from RSS feeds. There are several RSS readers available, a number of of them are free to download and use. RSS readers may have several special features, including combining several related feeds into a single view, changing icons to denote the user had already seen a particular item, list item views and categorizing feeds and items.

---