A quick intro to RSS

I was writing a quick comment about this for a friend on Facebook, and it kept getting longer and longer - also, not being able to add pictures or formatting seemed a bit limiting.  So here goes my first blog post in several years!

RSS (Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication, depending whom you ask), is just a way to see the most recent posts/articles from your favorite websites/blogs/webcomics/whatever, all in one place and at one time.  When this was first invented, one group of developers came up with a way of doing this and called it RSS, and another group came up with a similar-but-incompatible way and called it Atom.  Both standards still exist; most readers can handle feeds in either format, and a lot of websites provide feeds in both formats, just in case.  You really don't need to know which is which - it'll work either way.  Also - and this probably chafes the Atom guys no end - it's all called "RSS".