Argh! What is this rss thing of which you speak?

RSS? Subscribing? Huh?

That orange box-thing with the stripes? What does it all mean?

You’re definitely not the first person to tear out hair over this one.

Well, the letters in rss stand for “really simple syndication”. But that’s not all that important.

When people talk about rss, they really just mean a way — a very great way — to deliver web content (i.e. the stuff I write about) to you at your convenience.

The flow of that content from my site to your desktop is called a “feed”.

The Fluent Self rss feed provides updates whenever I put up new content — all you need to do is tell your “feed reader” (the software which collects the content) where to look, and it delivers the latest post right to your digital doorstep.

And I totally borrowed that sentence from my designer because it makes me sound like I know what I’m talking about.

Here’s what I can tell you:

RSS is cool because it gives you a ton of control:

1. It brings the stuff you like to you. You don’t have to remember which sites you like and that oh right, you wanted to go hang out there.

2. No one needs to know your email address. Obviously I would never, ever spam you in a gazillion trillion years. But rss definitely gives you that added layer of … comfortable-ness? And if you’re subscribing to someone’s blog and you’re not sure how much you trust them, this is the way to do it.

3. Unsubscribing is a painless click.

4. Comments are subscribable too. What that means is … if you find a post you really like and want to stay involved in the conversation about it, you can subscribe to the comments for that post and then you won’t miss out on what someone else has to say about it.

I know! It’s totally the future. Weird.

What you actually do to subscribe:

Click the orange thing. It will take you to a page that gives you a bunch of subscription options. I’m using Google at the moment because I like to see all my favorite blogs whenever I open a new page. And because I forget to open my reader. Play around. See what works. Or read the next section.

Still confused/curious? Want more help?

» If you want to start playing around more with rss, go watch this handy little video …

» There’s also a well-written and very thorough explanation of how rss works over at Copyblogger. Read it!

If you want to try it now, you can do it right here. (Or if you end up not liking rss, you can subscribe by email there too).

Does this help? I hope so! :)