If you are like me, you gather a lot of news, teaching ideas, and parenting tips from the Web. Each day, I visit several news sites, technology sites, teaching blogs, and gifted education blogs and sites. If I had to check every one of those sites to see if new content had been posted on a given day, I would spend a great deal of time checking each site individually.

Thankfully, there is a solution to this: RSS (Really Simple Syndication). An RSS "feed" is an easy way for a Web site to notify users of new content, as if to say, "I've got a new article posted. Here is the title of the article and a sample of what it is about. Would you like to read the article?" RSS offers a fantastic way to keep up to date with your favorite Web sites' most recent posts.

In fact, both of Prufrock's blogs have several handy RSS feeds located on the left side of the page (see "Categories/RSS"). The links to the RSS feeds are the little orange broadcast icons.

Finding Newly Posted Web Articles is Easy With RSS

There are several great tools out there designed to help you with RSS feeds. For example, Bloglines.com is a free, Web-based RSS reader (or "aggregator"). You set up a Bloglines account, add the RSS feeds from your favorite Web sites and blogs, and then Bloglines keeps up with new content posted to those sites. For example, in the image to the right, you can see a small sample of some Web sites I like to read. The feeds that are not in bold are sites that do not currently have new information. The ones in bold have new articles, and the number in parenthesis tells me how many. If I want to read the new articles, I simply click on a feed's title and I get a summary of all the new content.

Some browsers like Safari (Mac or PC) and Internet Explorer 7 (PC) have RSS capability built right in. Want to test if your browser can manage RSS feeds without special plug-ins? Just click this link to the RSS feed for my blog. If you get a listing of articles, you have an RSS-capable browser. If you get a bunch of code, you'll need to use a Web service like Bloglines, a browser plug-in, or a stand-alone application.

If you use Safari on your Mac or PC, Apple has posted simple instructions for using RSS feeds. If you use Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft has posted instructions as well.

There is a pretty general video overview of RSS titled, "How to Use RSS Feeds" at videojug.com. It's not detailed enough to explain everything, but it offers a nice advance organizer.

For a more thorough, step-by-step explanation, click here to read an article by Paul Stamatiou titled, "Getting Started with RSS."