The world of computing and the internet is full of acronyms and abbreviations which could make the beginner give up at first sight. A simple website might involve HTML, XHTML, CSS, jpg, swf, gif,php,MySql............................the list goes on.

Of course, it is not necessary for the average user to know any of this but with most things to do with computing , it is much easier actually doing something than reading about it.

One of the 'hot topics' recently has been XML and RSS. You might have noticed this icon appearing on websites, mainly the news networks such a the BBC or Reuters.

The idea is that you use a special newsreader to display links to the webpages containing the news items. This doesn't sound very exciting, but the point is that the links are updated automatically. Still not convinced? The best thing is to try it! There are good instructions on the BBC website and Reuters

My own recommendation is to download (free!) Mozilla Firefox as your web browser and/or Mozilla Thunderbird as your e-mail client. These both have RSS support built in. So you can then check your e-mail, check the news headlines, see the latest posts from my forum - all from the same program . I can thoroughly recommend Firefox as a web browser in any case. It has commom ancestry with Netscape Navigator and has features familiar to those of us who got our first taste of the web through a Netscape browser. It has many advantages over the Internet Explorer.

A good basic reader is Feedreader, available free

To add a feed to your reader, the usual procedure is to right-click on the XML icon, then "save target as" or "copy link location", depending on your browser. Different readers will vary, but typically you will select "add feed" and then paste the link.