MorganEnergy

Discussing Energy Economics on the Internet

About RSS

Posted by Staff on the May 19th, 2008

Do you ever get frustrated because you don’t know when new material is posted on your favorite web sites? I mean, you don’t have the time to check them all every day, do you? Wouldn’t it be easier if people who maintained web sites just told you when they had published something new? And preferably not through yet another spam email? Well the good news is that a lot of web sites actually do that, but if you are reading this page you probably didn’t know about it.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and that’s just what it does: it syndicates web site content around the Internet in a really simple way that anyone can use. The web sites broadcast their content in the form of “feeds” that can be picked up and read by “aggregation services”. Wherever you see this little symbol RSS you will know that the site has a feed that it is broadcasting.

But wait, what is an “aggregation service” and how do I get one? Well, you know that if you want to find anything on the Internet you go to Google. So guess who has an aggregation service? Just pop along to Google Reader and set up an account. Then come back here and click on one of the subscription links in our sidebar. (There are two, one for news posts, and one for comments on our posts). That will allow you to subscribe to our feeds. And then, all you need to do to check what’s new on our site is look at your Google Reader account every day. It will tell you if we have posted new information.

Many of the News sites we link to in our sidebar have their own feeds, so you can follow them as well. And most major newspapers have a selection of feeds too. So with one Google Reader account you can keep up to date with us, with other energy news services, with The Economist, and with a whole range of other web sites too.