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We live in the information age, and there’s just no getting around it. Information and news happens every single day, and savvy site surfers will expect you to update your content regularly. In fact, they’d prefer you to do that daily, or even hourly. And yes—I mean 24/7 hours.
But you gotta sleep, right? And have some time off occasionally. So instead of spending every waking hour relentlessly surfing around from site to site looking for content, wouldn’t you prefer it to be streamed in to your site? Well now you can, thanks to a very clever service, RSS.
RSS works so well that a lot of site owners swear it stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Why is it simple? Because you just select the content you like and have it delivered directly to your site.
If you’re a busy person—and who isn’t, these days—RSS feeds can take the hassle out of staying up-to-date, by streaming in the very latest information that you are interested in.
So where do you get this good stuff? Well, if it’s news you want, most of the major news sites provide it since it is growing rapidly in popularity. A few news services that provide it are Guardian, New York Times and CNN.

How do I start using RSS feeds?

Well, the first thing you’re gonna need is a news reader. There are many different versions of these, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. All allow you to display and subscribe to the RSS feeds you want.
My top picks for news readers, listed by the operating system they work with, are:

1. Mac OS X: NetNewsWire This is a simple yet elegant Mac-like aggregator that any one can use, yet it’s powerful.
2. Windows: SharpReader A very simple tool, but it delivers the goods.
3. Linux: Straw The best very aggregator for GNOME.
4. Web: Bloglines Enough said.

Now, after you’ve chosen a news reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want. For example, if you would like the latest BBC News Entertainment stories, simply visit the Entertainment section and you will notice an orange RSS button on the left hand side.
The RSS button typically looks like this example from the BBC (http://www.bbc.com) page:

If you click on the RSS button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways: you can either drag the URL of the RSS feed into your news reader, or you can cut and paste the URL into a new feed in your news reader.
Some browsers, including Firefox, Opera and Safari, have functionality that automatically picks up RSS feeds for you. To make absolutely sure, check the details on the homesites of those browsers.
RSS feeds are a great way to get free content streaming onto your pages.
The only downside is that most of the free RSS feeds are news-oriented or entertainment-oriented, so if you run, say, a site that focuses on the latest video games, your audience may not really care that they can get the latest news streaming in there.
As far as the nitty-gritty, each RSS channel can contain up to 15 items and is easily parsed using Perl or other open source software. If you want more details, I suggest you check out Jonathan Eisenzopf’s excellent article in the February issue of Web Techniques.
But you don’t really have to worry too much over the details, since a simple Google search on “free open source RSS feed scripts” will produce the code you need to create your own RSS channel.
The next step, once you’ve created and validated your RSS text file, is to register it at the various aggregators, and start watching your traffic really spike. This happens because now any site can grab and display your feed regularly, which will drive traffic straight to your site.
It gets better—if you update your RSS file, all the external sites that subscribe to your feed will be automatically updated. What could be easier, other than watching those nice, fat checks from your Google AdSense ads roll in? Well, if you use RSS feeds, they’ll work together!

In this article I’m going to clarify common but frequently confused computer terminology: “operating system”, or “OS”.

Maybe you’ve found you have questions and ask yourself what OS means,, if so, you’re not alone in wondering about this.

This is actually a pretty simple idea to make sense of when you have it explained the right way, as you’ll discover as soon as you’ve finished learning from this basic computer lesson.

Let me begin by mentioning first that an OS or operating system is a kind of software.

To repeat my explanation from a previous article, here’s how you can think of software:

“Software” refers to all of the pieces of the computer that you can’t really observe or touch directly. Software would include things like Microsoft Excel, Internet Explorer, Windows or the Mac OS, as well as all of your personal files like letters, photos, MP3s, and so on.

Here’s another way to think about it: hardware is like your brain, a physical part of your body, while software is like your mind or your thoughts — the non-physical part of yourself.

Software runs on hardware, just like your thoughts “run on” your brain.

Does that make sense?So let’s look at the OS specifically.

So,let me give a couple of examples:  the two best known operating systems right now are Windows, and Mac OS X (pronounced “Oh Ess Ten” — as in the Roman numeral ten).

Windows Vista and Windows XP are two versions of Windows.  While Mac OS 10.4 ( also called”Tiger”) and the newer Mac OS 10.5 ( a.k.a”Leopard”) are a couple different versions of Mac OS X.

Alright,so what is an OS?

Here’s one way to think about it:when a baby is born, they have the instinct to eat, to breathe, and so on, and they also have the instinct to watch, listen, and absorb everything going on around them.

In time, a young child learns to talk and walk by observing the people around them, and as they get older, they also learn more basic skills like reading and writing, hand-eye coordination, and so on.

So in other words, they go from barely being able to anything but eat, sleep, and fill diapers, to physical and mental maturity where they have all the basic skills they need to learn more specific skills such as learning to drive, playing a sport like soccer, writing a paper for a class, getting a job ,etc.

In some ways, when you start up a computer, it’s sort of like a newborn baby, only having one or two fundamental”instincts.”

The computer can power on, and display an image on the monitor, but that’s about it.

The only other thing the computer can do is look at the hard drive, and if it finds the information it needs there, it can start running the OS.

This is called “booting”, which is what happens between when you turn the computer on, and when you can actually start using it.

And the best way to think about it is that it’s just like a child being born and growing up: the OS has the “life experiences” and lessons that give a “child” all the basic skills equivalent to walking, talking, reading, writing, etc., that allow everything else to hapen.

So in a sense, it’s as if your computer is “born” and “grows up” in the space of 30 to 60 seconds or so( sometimes longer for some computers) that it takes to “boot” the OS.

So, the OS is much like those fundamental skills we all have and learned as we grew up. More precisely, it’s the software on your computer that draws its desktop, the icons on it, moves the little mouse pointer around on the screen when you move your mouse around, lets you view and open files, lets you type, — you get the idea.

Without the OS, you couldn’t do anything with a PC but turn it on and see an error message such as”non system disk or disk error” on a Windows-type computer, or a flashing question mark on one of Apple’s Macs.

So even though a lot of people don’t really understand what an OS is, or what it does, none of us could use a PC without it.

Now you know the answer to what’s an OS and what’s it for.