CharCon FAQ

If you can't afford to miss out on the latest news, are having a hard time managing the deluge of information you receive via e-mail, or simply want a more convenient way to manage and control your online news and information, RSS feeds may be the answer.

Using very simple, easy-to-use, free or low-cost software called an RSS reader, you can have all the latest headlines on topics you choose delivered to your desktop for free. You can even choose the source. When your reader displays a headline of interest, click the headline and you'll be whisked to the source Web site for the full story. With RSS you no longer have to visit your favorite Web sites to check for new updates--you simply open up your reader and see all the headlines from all your selected sources in a matter of seconds.

You can even choose to get "aggregrated" feeds on a particular topic, in which headlines are delivered to you from a variety of sources. RSS makes keeping up with the information that matters to you easy.

There are many different software solutions for subscribing to RSS feeds, we will not attempt to cover them all here.

The RSS aggregator that the CharCon webmaster recommends for novice and pro alike is the Google Reader. You can access the Google Reader at http://www.google.com/reader

You can easily add the RSS feeds for most of your favorite sites (assuming they offer a feed) by clicking the 'Add Subsciption' button and then entering the sites address (i.e. http://www.charcon.org)

There are some more advanced things you can do with feeds, like just get a feed of a particular portion/forum of a site...but you should get the hang of just getting the basic feeds before you dive into the harder stuff.