Droid X: The Missing Manual

Getting the Facts with RSS

If you’re reading this book, you’re not only a Droid X user, but you’re probably also a victim of information glut. You’ve got too much information battling for a shrinking amount of your time. There are countless websites and blogs out there with useful and interesting information you’d like to get to, but who has the time?

That’s where RSS (Really Simple Syndication) comes in. With RSS, you subscribe to feeds, which are summaries and excerpts of information provided by many thousands of sources across the Internet, ranging from big, internationally known news sources such as Reuters and the New York Times, to some guy in his basement who knows everything there is to know about 18th-century lute making and wants to share that information with the world. RSS is particularly popular among bloggers.

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you see a list of the latest blurbs from a news source. In many instances, those summaries are all you want. Think of them as your own personalized news ticker. However, if you want more information about those summaries and blurbs, you can tap one and get sent to a web page with the full story or more information.

As explained on The Address Bar, to subscribe to an RSS feed, tap the RSS button that appears whenever you’re on a page that has an RSS feed. The button doesn’t appear unless there’s an RSS feed available. Tap the button, ...