Time for a show of hands. How many Colaspot readers waste too much time surfing? OK, put them down. Now, how many of you have never heard the acronym RSS? Same people? I thought so.

RSS actually stands for Really Simple Syndication. Just as HTML is a text format that allows pages on a Web site to contain images, links, and other fancy stuff, RSS is a text format for publishing lists of articles on a Web server. Unlike HTML pages, which are written by humans, RSS files are generally created and updated by a program.

“Fine,” I hear you saying, “please tell me why I care?”

Those of you who raised your hands in response to the first question — how many times a day do you go back to your favorite sites (like this one, of course) and manically wear out your refresh button to see if there’s anything new? Wouldn’t it be great to have a program that did the refreshing for you, so you could actually get some work done? That’s what the RSS file (normally called a feed) is for. Every time a new article is added to the site, a program adds the content to the RSS feed. All you have to do is use a feed reader (also called an aggregator) of your choice to subscribe to the feed, and new content will hop into your aggregator just like email to your inbox.

“Aha,” says you, “I’m sold. Where do I find this magical aggregator?”

To which I respond: Are you using Firefox like a good surfer? Then you have one already. Look up at your address bar. (That’s the text window that says http://colaspot.com/.) See the little orange square that has what looks like radio waves in it?* Click it. A window pops up asking you to create a bookmark. Go ahead and do that. Then go find that bookmark in Firefox. It’s no ordinary bookmark — it expands to show you all the articles recently posted to Colaspot! Ain’t it cool? New Colaspot articles will now come to you; no longer do you have to come looking for them.

You can do this with any site that supports RSS. Any blog or news site worth reading — even The State — has at least one RSS feed. And there are plenty of free aggregators — both web-based and downloadable — that offer a better feed-reading experience than Firefox. I’ve asked Bryan to give you a quick tour of his favorite, Google Reader, so stay tuned for that.

Happy surfing. Your refresh button will thank you.

*It was pointed out to me that the orange square is in the address bar in Firefox 1.5 only. For earlier versions, the square is down at the bottom, on the right side of the status bar.