Readers Ask - What is an RSS feed ?

Many readers have responded to the previous post and most of the questions relate to the RSS feed. I am trying to answers all of them through this article.

What is an RSS Feed ?

An RSS feed is a page that contains a simple HTML of the site. When a new page is published on an RSS supported site, this information is converted to a simpler form and stored as an RSS feed.

What is the use of an RSS feed ?

If we are in need to keep up to date information from a site of interest, then what we do is keep visiting it often and suddeny notice that the information got published on the day you missed going there. To avoid this you can use an RSS reader like Google Reader and subscribe to the RSS feed of the sites. Now whenever the site updates you will get instant information in your RSS reader just like an email.

How do I know whether a particular site has an RSS feed or not ?

A small icon can be seen in any variant of the following as shown below.

On AMU news and views it appears as the following picture.

How to subscribe to an RSS feed ?
When you click on this icon it will present you with a list of readers to subsribe it to. You can choose the RSS reader of your choice. The Google Reader seems to be the best so far. If you have a gmail or any other gogle account you can easily use the same id for this as well.