Making Your Own News Page Is Really Simple

Imagine a book without an index, chapters, page numbers or paragraphs. All the information you'd ever need might be at your fingertips, but without a clear way to sift through it, the chances that you'll find what you're looking for are slim.

In a way, that's what you get with the Internet -- news, commentary, entertainment and more scattered throughout cyberspace, waiting for you to discover it.

You know that search engines can help you find it. And maybe you've got an extensive list of bookmarks that help you quickly navigate to favored sites.

But how much do you know about something called RSS -- a technology that allows you to put updates from news sites in one easy-to-scan location on your computer or on the Web?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a tool that allows you to subscribe to a site's update feature with only a few mouse clicks.

The idea of RSS is not new. But many Web sites that were quick to add one-click buttons for RSS subscriptions -- also called feeds -- didn't really offer much of an explanation of how they work.

When RSS appeared a few years ago, programs that organized the feeds -- called aggregators -- were widely used.

Now, popular search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, offer customized home pages that allow you to send RSS feeds directly to those pages. Applications such as Mozilla's Thunderbird make reading RSS feeds as easy as reading e-mail.

An important thing to remember is that while subscribing to an RSS feed has become much easier, there's still not a universal method for subscribing.

Some sites put the familiar orange RSS icon on pages with no instructions. Others create a separate page for RSS subscriptions, usually found by clicking on a link buried at the bottom of the home page.

Washingtonpost.com offers several methods, using an orange button labeled XML (which is a type of programming code used to send feeds) to steer you in the right direction, and a drop-down menu that offers a list of commonly used aggregators.

Some include a series of buttons on the site: "Add to Yahoo" or "del.icio.us," one of the popular aggregators, for example. In some cases, a "+" sign is a recognizable symbol for an RSS feed.

It takes some time to set up an RSS page, finding the right sites to add and deleting the ones that don't deliver what you need. But once you're done, it's like having a news Web page that you can call your own.