What is an RSS feed?
Essentially, RSS feeds – or news feeds – are an easy way to read the latest news and articles from different websites in one convenient place, without the hassle of actually having to visit the various sites.
For example, if you regularly visit the BBC website to read the news, Sky to read the sports, Confused.com to read money-saving tips and buyers guides, and HotUkDeals to check out the latest bargains – subscribe to their RSS feeds instead and these sites will send you regular updates direct to your desktop. So there's no need to visit them individually.
In fact, the way an RSS reader works is not dissimilar to the way Confused.com works. Confused.com is an aggregator of online insurance quotes (i.e. it gathers insurance quotes from around the web), whereas an RSS news reader is an aggregator of news stories (i.e. it gathers news stories from around the web) – with both services collating your required information into one convenient, easy-to-read place.
How to use RSS feeds
To use RSS feeds (RSS, by the way, stands for Really Simple Syndication), you will first need to either download an RSS reader or use Firefox as your web browser, which has a built-in RSS reader.
With downloadable news readers you can only access your news feeds on your main computer; but with a browser application, you can check out the latest news with the click of a button wherever you are – kind of like using Hotmail for your email provider rather than Outlook.
Popular RSS readers include: Awasu ; Bloglines ; FeedDemon ; FeedZilla ; Google Reader ; Microsoft Live ; My Yahoo ; Newsfire and NewsGator.
Subscribing to RSS feeds
Once you’ve installed your chosen news reader, you’ll need to tell it which websites to scour for new content. To do this, simply visit your favourite websites and look out for the orange RSS icon.
To subscribe to a website’s RSS feed, you can either click the orange button to add the page to your news reader, or cut and paste or drag the page URL of the feed into the news reader which you can activate.
Once you’ve done this, your news reader will then begin to automatically download the latest stories that go live on those websites. You can then read the latest articles on your news reader without the hassle of having to visit the actual webpage.
Confused.com RSS Feeds
Confused.com’s website is a treasure trove of consumer-interest articles, handy hints, money-saving tips, and user guides for all things car insurance, home insurance, travel insurance, utilities, mortgages, loans and more.
Furthermore, as our articles and news stories are updated regularly, if you want to stay clued up on what’s new on Confused.com , just click the RSS link – it’s that easy.
