Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way for online publishers to send stories, pictures and multimedia directly to your computer for free. Instead of going to 10-15 of your favourite websites each day to see if there is anything new on there, you can subscribe to an RSS feed from those same websites and when something is updated, it is sent to your computer allowing you view it at your leisure.

It is really simple and easy to use RSS. To get started you need a feed reader – which is software that checks your feeds and lets you read the new content as it is added to your favourite sites. Luckily for you we have built a feed reader into your sharemyNZ profile – cool eh! Your feed reader is your favourite feeds section on the bottom left of your profile page.

We’ve written a whole post on how to add a new feed to your profile so check it out. To start you out we've also automatically added a variety of feeds to your profile when you signed up. But quickly, to add a feed you need to look out for the orange RSS icon (right) on your favourite websites. Not all will have them, but most sites are building RSS into their designs. Once you’ve found this RSS icon, click on it and copy the feed url into your sharemyNZ feed reader.

You’ll notice that on all of the sharemyNZ blogs there is an orange RSS icon at this top of them. This is so you can syndicate your own blogs to people that may want to keep up to date with it. Don’t worry; this happens automatically when you start a blog, and if you want it to be private, only those users in your favourite people section can see it.