Element Fusion

Many of you are web savvy internet users who are already RSS aware. This post is not for you.

This post is for those of you who have not yet experienced the power of RSS. What is RSS, you ask? If you are asking that, or if you've never done anything with RSS, then this post is for you.

RSS is an extremely important technology. It makes the sharing of information across different websites and different technology systems seamless. RSS has been around a long time, but it's starting gain popularity at an exponential rate.

How can I use RSS?

I can't possibly detail all of the great things about RSS in a single post, so I'm just going to try and give you a little taste. Open up Internet Explorer version 7 and put the following URL in the address bar:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/elementfusion

That is the RSS address for the blog you are reading here. When you go to that address in Internet Explorer 7, you'll get a page that shows all of our recent blog posts. At the top, you'll see a little box with a link that says "subscribe to this feed". Click that link, save the feed, and you are subscribed.

Big deal, you say? Why would I subscribe to a feed? Well, it's not a big deal to subscribe if you only read one blog. But what if you want to read 5 blogs, or 10, or 20, or 50. Do you want to have to visit all 50 blog sites every day to check and see if there's any new content?

With RSS, you can open up a single application (like IE7) and it will tell you if any of the blogs to which you subscribe have new content available, then you can click to read that new content right there in the same application, instead of having to jump across multiple websites. So try it out. Follow the process above with other blogs you like. Look for the "feed" or "subscribe" button on the blog and click it. Then copy the feed address to IE7 and subscribe. Then, click to view your favorites in IE7 and select "feeds". You'll see a list of all the feeds you're subscribed to and when new content is available, the feel will turn bold. Sweet.

What if you're on a Mac, or don't have IE7? Well, I haven't tested out that many Mac browsers, but I'm almost sure that at least Firefox has feed reading built in. You can try the same procedure -- going to the feed address above -- and see what pops up.

Also, there are other applications like Google Reader (http://reader.google.com) that let you subscribe to feeds and easily read them.  The nice thing about Google Reader is that no matter what computer you use, you can login and access all of your feeds.  If you subscribe through browsers, you have to set them up individual on each computer you want to use.

The reason I mention IE7 here is because it's easy to explain, and I've also noticed that IE7 has one of the quickest feed update times. Often, Google reader can delay several hours between the time a new post is posted and the time it shows up in your reader.

No matter what application you choose, I highly recommend you explore the power of RSS by making use of this simple principle of subscribing to content.