I use Bloglines as my reader and Firefox 2.0 as my browser. Bloglines is just a website that I am registered on (it was free; I still don't know where they are getting their money, unless this is strictly a plan to cash out in the future, kind of like farming?). When a web page I'm interested in is RSS enabled, I can click on the orange radio symbol in my address bar and Firefox knows to send the link to Bloglines. Bloglines will open a web page which asks me what folder to put the link into along with some other details (see the first picture). IE 7 has a similar procedure. You need to set up either browser to enable the radio symbol to take you to Bloglines.

To see any new articles from any web site, I go to Bloglines and scan for bolded sites. See the left side of the second picture. By clicking on a single site, I will see only new articles from that site in the right panel. By clicking on a folder, all new articles within the folder show up in the right side. It's kind of like opening a newspaper section by section.

The hardest part for me to get started was figuring out what reader to use (I tried a few, but until I heard about Bloglines, they were all too geeky for me). Also, some web pages can be subscribed to, but the icon doesn't show up in the address bar. Things are better now that Firefox and IE7 both have native support for RSS, plus there are dedicated readers that will automate the subscribing as well.

There are basically three types of readers. Bloglines, Google Reader, Firefox's and IE7's built-in readers all allow you to read within a browser. The first two maintain the list on their own websites so you can log in from anywhere and see what's new. That's great when you are jumping from computer to computer.

There are readers that attach themselves to Outlook. Each new article shows up as an email message. I don't use Outlook at home so this doesn't work for me. This would be better when you use RSS as a research tool. Any articles you want to save can be kept in an email folder.

Another group are just separate programs that are web enabled to fetch the articles. The first generation of these just seemed clumsy, but I haven't looked at any for a couple years.

In general, I like subscribing to sites that don't have daily updates. That way, I don't waste time looking for new articles, but don't miss it when a fresh article comes along. There are a few agricultural related RSS sites, but by far the most RSS sites are computer related.

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