What is RSS?
I’m often telling people (friends, family, etc) that a good way to keep updated on the progress of EOS is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of the website. More often than not, people look at me with a blank stare. Since a lot of people don’t know about RSS, this post is about RSS and what it will do for you. RSS will keep you notified about updates to websites (like this one). The first thing you need in order to use RSS is get a “news aggregator”. Don’t worry, you don’t need to download or buy anything. I’ve been using MyYahoo as my news aggregator - it’s free (you’ll need a yahoo account). There are lots of other news aggregators out there. (I’ll give you a list of news aggregators at the end of this article.) This is what my MyYahoo page looks like:
I’ve actually got about a dozen websites or so on my MyYahoo page. Instead of going to each website to see if there’s anything new, I just go to my MyYahoo page and it shows me what’s new at each of the websites. As you can see from the image, I’ve subscribed to the Empires Of Steel Developers Diary, Slashdot, and the Daily Show. I can add or remove websites from this list, and rearrange their order if I want to. It’s pretty convenient - especially for websites that aren’t updated all that often, because you know to visit the website if there’s something new, and when there isn’t anything new, you know that you don’t need to visit the website.
If this sounds cool, then here’s how to get a your own news aggregator up and running:
First, you need to chose a news aggregator. They come in a whole bunch of different varieties:
Yahoo News Aggregator: my.yahoo.com
Google News Aggregator: www.google.com/reader
Newsgator: www.newsgator.com
NewsBurst: www.newsburst.com
AOL news reader: feeds.my.aol.com
Feedlounge: feedlounge.com ($5/month)
Feedreader (free, opensource News Aggregator) www.feedreader.com
The only aggregators I’ve used are MyYahoo and Google, but I prefer MyYahoo. If you already have a yahoo account, it’s easy to setup. Go to my.yahoo.com. You’ll go through a quick setup process and then you can add content to your MyYahoo page. To add the Empires of Steel Developers Diary, you can either click on this link: 
, or, from your MyYahoo page, click on “Add Content”, click on “Add RSS by URL”, and then copy and paste “http://www.empiresofsteel.com/devdiary/” into the box, click “Add”, and then click “Add to MyYahoo”. You should be able rearrange the order of your page by dragging the title bars.
Not all websites provide RSS feeds, a but a lot of them do (especially major ones). If a website doesn’t have an RSS feed, you won’t be able to add it to your news aggregator.