Have you heard about these newfangled RSS feeds that have been popping up all over the internet? They are everywhere. Every site now offers its content in RSS format. But every time I click on their RSS feed icon, it just spits me over to a page with a bunch of programming code on it. I do not know why RSS feeds are so popular if that is what they are giving you.

Then, I discovered what the RSS feed really does. It is basically a little connection that runs from that website to your own, personal RSS news aggregator. RSS news aggregators are the programs that can read all of that confusing internet coding, and transform it into updates.

You can subscribe to any RSS feed that you can find, and somehow, through the mysteries of technology, your RSS news aggregator picks it up, recognizes it for what it is, and then puts it in with the rest of your feeds. It can save you a ton of time.

For example, before I found RSS feed aggregators, I would open up a new tab for every single page that I wanted to check out. It would take several minutes for each tab to load. Not so bad, except that half of the time the site had not posted any new updates, so I had just sat around, waiting for nothing.

Now, instead of opening them all and letting them load, I just open one. I open my shiny, sleek RSS reader, and all of my feeds are collected right there. Not only that, but it tells me as things are updating, and what has been updated recently. I can keep the program running in the background as I am using the computer, and it tells me as the updates happen live. No more checking back for no reason.

So hop on the RSS train. Get a reader or aggregator, and then subscribe to your heart’s content. You will save so much time that you may actually be able to get some stuff done at work instead of trying to check the latest news all the time.