RSS is a buz word in the net and it’s been there for quiet a long time. It’s only recently that I appreciated it’s use when I started blogging. I have lot’s of friends and family members that have blogs. Just imagine if I have say 20 blogs of my friends to visit everyday. How much time do you think I will spend in browsing all their sites to keep track of what’s happening around? Then it dawned to me that RSS was really a tool to facilitate this process.

What is RSS?

RSS (which, in its latest format, stands for “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually. - wikipedia

Firefox browser comes with a “feed-read” or “aggregator” in the form of Live Bookmarks to access blog sites that have web feeds. Most of the blog sites have some web feed available for a visitor to subscribe on.

Knowing whether a site have a web feed or not is not that difficulty with the aid of firefox.

When you see the RSS icon (orange icon) on the right hand side of the address bar as shown above then that means that site is RSS ready.

 Moreover subscribing is very easy. Just click on the RSS icon in the address bar and a drop down menu will apear.

And click on Subscribe to ‘simplepleasures’… (the name of the site feed). An Add Live Bookmark windows will pop up.

In the Name field you can type an appropriate name if you wish and be sure that the Create In field have been set to Bookmarks Toolbar Folder to facilitate visibility and accessibility of the feeds. Click Ok to finish the installation.

You can check whether the Live Bookmark was successfully installed when in the Bookmarks Toolbar the added Live Bookmark is shown. If you can not see the Bookmarks Toolbar be sure to have the Bookmarks Toolbar activated by going to View->Toolbars->Bookmarks Toolbar on the browsers menu.

From then on just by clicking on the name of the Live Bookmarks, it will drop down the list of the latest contents based on the site updates.

Try and use it. You’ll for sure appreciate it’s use.