With millions of websites and blogs constantly posting stories and updates, it can be hard to keep abreast of the latest developments. Whether you are interested in news, sport, entertainment or blogs, the chances are you visit a large number of websites multiple times throughout the day.

News junkies are probably familiar with RSS feeds, which provide a means of having the latest headlines delivered to you without the need to join an emailing list or share any personal information with a third party.

Indeed, RSS feeds have become so popular that even web browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox can display their contents.

For a simple guide, see our recent article Read RSS news feeds in your web browser. But there’s more to RSS than meets the eye. In this Masterclass we’ll show how you can take RSS to the next level.

RSS basics
There are two formats in which news feeds can be provided – RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom. There are differences between the two, but these won’t affect most users. Atom feeds can show the type of data they contain (such as HTML, audio and video), can have their time stamp updated if a particular story is changed, and include more advanced language options to allow for country-specific feeds.

In order to stay up to date with feeds, a feed reader or aggregator is needed. This can be a standalone program such as Feedreader, an online aggregator such as Google Reader or a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.

A dedicated aggregator may include advanced options such as feed filtering, searching and a greater level of customisation, but the built-in feed support of modern web browsers is fine for day-to-day use.

Finding and managing RSS feeds
The presence of a feed on a website is normally indicated by an orange RSS icon both on the page itself and in the toolbar or address bar of a web browser.

Click a feed icon in Internet Explorer and a summary of the feed will be shown along with the option to subscribe to it. Click this link and the feed will be added to the Feeds folder in the Favorites Center sidebar.

In Firefox things are different. Again, there is the option to subscribe to the feed in the browser – making use of Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature – but other available aggregators will also be detected and these can be used to subscribe instead.

With a dedicated aggregator, such as Feedreader, the process of subscribing to feeds is far less automated than when using a web browser’s built-in tool.

Internet Explorer will not detect the presence of aggregators that have been installed, so it is first necessary to copy the address of the feed you are interested in before pasting it into Feedreader.

The same method can be used with Firefox, although this does give the option to select which program to use after clicking the page’s RSS icon.