RSS

RSS (which stands for something Really Surprisingly Stupid) is a powerful way to simplify and organize your consumption of web content. RSS feeds contain the important information you find on web sites, stripped down to the good stuff and organized into "items." You can think of RSS feeds as radio signals coming from your favorite sites, and your "feed reader" as the radio that gives you ready access to whatever channel you want to tune in to.

Imagine it: there are 100 websites you'd like to visit every day. But let's say for the sake of argument that you have a life outside the internet, and there's no way you're going to make it to 100 sites every day. That's where your feed reader comes in. The software collects the items in your feeds and keeps them sorted by source and the time they were posted or updated. So you open up your reader, and you can see how many new posts there are from, say, BlueNC. Or maybe you have a folder called "politics", where you can see a list of new items from BlueNC, Scrutiny Hooligans, the Southern Dem, and so on. See a headline that looks boring? Skip it. Read something that is awesome? Save the item for later. And you can always click through to the original site.

There are a bunch of feed readers out there, and each comes with instructions on how to find and "subscribe" to feeds. (Don't be daunted -- despite all the jargon, it's not all that difficult.) I think that the most popular web-based reader is Bloglines, but I think that's just because people haven't tried Google's Reader. As always, there's plenty more information on feeds and readers to be found by searching the web.

Here's a rundown on the feeds we're offering at BlueNC as I write this.

Everything but the comments
Blog posts, events, polls, audio, etc. This is the feed to subscribe to if you don't want to miss a thing.

Front page only
This is a quieter feed than the "Everything" feed. See only the items that appear on the front page.

All blogs
Every blog that gets posted (front page or not), but none of the other stuff (like polls, events and audio).

All comments
A feed containing all of the comments posted to BlueNC.

Comments on this page only
Comments on a particular blog entry, audio post, poll, etc. (This option will only appear on pages that may have comments.)

Polls
"Screw the other stuff, I just want to vote." This is your feed.

Audio (podcast)
Just the audio posts.