As the amount of content available online grows each day, the challenge has become managing and monitoring the information. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a tool that delivers updates to all your favorite sites in one place, rather than you visiting a number of sites every day to check for new content.

To use RSS, you will need a news reader, also called an aggregator. News readers can be web-based, an add-on to your e-mail client or integrated into your browser. Google provides a comprehensive list of news readers.

Once you've installed a news reader, you subscribe to RSS feeds, which are XML files that are automatically updated as new content is added to a site. Feeds are common on news sites and blogs, but numerous other sites offer RSS feeds as well. Your news reader will provide instructions on how to subscribe to feeds. When you open your news reader, you will be able to instantly see up-to-the-minute updates to every site to whose feed you are subscribed, rather than having to visit each site individually and manually determine what is new content.

The APA Blog for Professional Associates offers numerous choices for feeds. You can subscribe to the feed for the blog, or you can filter the content by only subscribing to certain categories. When you subscribe to the blog feed, you can choose between short mode or full mode. The short mode provides the headline and a partial display of the entry, allowing you to click to visit the site for the full entry. The full mode delivers the complete text to your reader. If you are interested in only certain categories of entries, you can choose to subscribe to the feed for that category by using the links in the "Archives by Category" section. The category RSS feeds send you the entries in full mode. You’ll have to visit the web site to see any comments.

For more information on RSS feeds, consult the RSS entry on Wikipedia.