OK. You’ve setup the blog and now you want to make sure EVERYBODY can read what you’re writing. The best way to do that is to setup an RSS feed, maybe a couple of feeds, depending on the site.

Just what is RSS?As a reader it’s what gets me what I want, when what I want is more information. And face it, that’s every waking moment, isn’t it? I might have found your site and really liked it. I might have even bookmarked it or put it in my favorites, along with about a thousand others. Most likely, I just moved on, and now I can’t remember who you are or what you wrote, but I remember it was pretty good.

With an RSS feed, your readers can subscribe to your blog, pretty much like a magazine or a newspaper. Every time you publish something new, your subscribers find out about it. Makes it really easy on them. This is something you really need, if you don’t have it already.

RSS is generally considered to mean “Really Simple Syndication”. It gives you a way to automatically search your favorite news sites and blogs for whatever is new, saving you the time of looking all over the web for what you know is there. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now, and I couldn’t get by without it. Chances are, your readers are in the same boat.

There are over 200 individual RSS feeds that I keep up with, representing such diverse areas as poetry, science news, world news, web and tech news, and blogs from around the world. There is simply no way I can keep up with all that by visiting the sites individually. RSS keeps it all available, showing at a glance when something new or pertinent has been published on the web.

Daniela Barbosa, who authors one of the blogs I follow, recently posted the following video on RSS.(Thanks for reminding me, Daniela!) I have to take a moment here to compliment the guys who created the video. Those guys at CommonCraft are video masters. This is perhaps the best explanation of RSS I have seen. Enjoy…