Vital News makes several different RSS feeds available for your convenience.
If you know absolutely nothing about RSS, your eyes probably glazed over about half-way through that last sentence. I can hear you now: "What the heck is RSS?"
Good question. Depending on who you ask, RSS is an acronym for either Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. The bottom line is that RSS is a convenient way for publishers to provide content that you are interested in. That means that Vital News can provide tips on how to use Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel to you on a regular basis.
OK, now I can hear you saying "But isn't that what e-mail is for?" Yes, e-mail is one method to deliver content, and Vital News has been providing content using that medium for almost a decade. Unfortunately, the tips we publish tend to get lost in--you guessed it--the deluge of spam that floods most people's in-boxes.
What's a publisher to do? The answer is RSS, which delivers content using a different medium than e-mail. You subscribe to an RSS feed (the content delivered by RSS is called a feed) using a special program called an aggregator. These programs allow you to subscribe to any number of feeds that you like, from any number of publishers. When you subscribe, you provide no personal information. For instance, you don't provide a name or an e-mail address. Instead, the aggregator takes care of periodically checking the Vital News Web site to see what is new. Information about the new items are displayed by the aggregator, and you can pick and choose exactly what you want to see.
The immediate benefit of RSS is that you get the same information you would have gotten through e-mail, but without the risk of the information being diverted by over-aggressive spam filters.
Questions? Just let me know and I'll see what I can do to help out.
If you'd like to give RSS a try, just do a quick Web search for "RSS aggregator" and you should get plenty of choices that you can check out. (Most aggregators range in price from free to about $30, so you'll want to look around a bit.)
How you subscribe to the Vital News RSS feeds depends, in large part, on the aggregator you are using. In some programs it may be as simple as a click on the RSS icons (see the icons on our RSS feed information page), while in other programs it may take a couple more steps.
Check your aggregator's documentation for more information on how to add new feeds.