What is RSS
Feed Simple
After discovering that the little orange buttons labeled with the cryptic message "XML" wouldn't provide a one-click solution, I realized I couldn't surf through this without reading the instructions. I found some -- at my own Web site -- including Google's list of reader software. But out of the 15 readers I tried to download, I couldn't get more than one or two to work properly. At this point I threw the whole enterprise in the garbage. To hell with RSS, I said to myself. I only went this far because I get a paycheck. If I were doing this on my own free time, I never would have gotten past the jabberwocky of computer code I got when I hit the orange buttons.
A week later I was foraging for crumbs of news at bloglines.com, which hosts thousands upon thousands of bloggers typing away like the proverbial 700 monkeys. I glanced at the left side of the screen and there, in a column down the left side, was a folder with a tab labeled, "My Feeds." I remembered my experience from a week earlier and raced back to my Web site. I clicked on the orange button and got the infuriating screen of nonsense. Unlike before, I copied the Web address, went back to bloglines and clicked on the "subscribe" button. A new window appeared, letting me drop in the address. Up popped the headlines and the lead paragraphs. Not quite a one-click solution, but still painless -- a true "Hallelujah" moment.
