What is an RSS or news feed?
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works – such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video – in a standardized format.
An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus additional information ("metadata") such as publishing dates and authorship.
Web feeds benefit publishers of content by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to bring together feeds from many sites into one place.
RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized Extensible Markup Language (XML) file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs.
How to subscribe
You can subscribe to a feed on our site by entering the feed's link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon (like the one at right) or RSS link in a browser that initiates the subscription process. After you have subscribed to a feed, the RSS reader checks your subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.
The initials "RSS" are used to refer to the following formats: "Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)", "RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)", or "Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)".
Adapted from Wikipedia article on RSS feeds.