Ask Edwin: Could you help me understand RSS feeds and how to utilize them effectively?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Most website templates like Wordpress and Squarespace automatically generate an RSS feed from the site's blog posts. When someone makes a blog post, the RSS code grabs the title, date, author, and content of the post, including images sometimes, and generates a spreadsheet combining all the other posts.This is great for users who want something of a newspaper collage from all their different sources in one place. To create that collage you use a feed aggregator like feedly.com to quickly pull up and read articles without having to go to the site, see ads or irrelevant content.Are you familiar with Feedly.com? It's one of the most friendly feed aggregators I have found. You can search for blogs on Feedly or plug in a blog/site URL and it will search for the feed. After you have a number of feeds added to your account, you can organize them into folders. Feedly also has keyboard shortcuts like hitting 'J' to jump to the next article quickly.If you subscribe to podcasts and browse them all on iTunes (or another podcast service) RSS is a lot like that. In fact, I believe that podcasts use RSS code to help iTunes aggregate their store. You don't go to each site to listen to a podcast, they come to you, or in this case the iTunes store.Some websites specifically allow only article snippets or don't generate RSS feeds at all because they need you to be on their site for the ad revenue.Thanks for your question!