I’ll be perfectly honest with you–I’ve gotten lost when it comes to terms such as CSS, RSS, CPanel, and Bandwidth Overload. These words are prevalent in the tech community, which I am certainly not a premium member of, hence the fact that I can easily get confused, just as you can.

But really, I do know how to do a little more than your average 15 5/6 year old kid. I have a decent grasp of HTML, or at least, enough to get by. But I really get lost when I travel more than surface deep.

One of the most important aspects of your blog is your “feed,” which is simply defined as a link that readers can subscribe to. Yes, I know that made a lot of sense, but hang in there with me.

Let’s pretend that you already have a feed (you probably do if you use Blogger). I have a “feed reader” which is called Thunderbird. It’s similar to email, and can actually be used for email. Thunderbird allows me to subscribe to the site’s feed and putting it in my list of feeds to check daily.

When I check my feeds, it sends me a copy of all the latest posts on the site’s of my choice. In other words, you need some type of feed reader such as Bloglines or Thunderbird to keep updated on any blog you want.

That’s basically what RSS and XML are: feeds that syndicate your site like a newspaper, sending it to inboxes of subscriber’s. I encourage you to subscribe to my feed, which is helped out by feedburner, another great tool to spice up your feed if you’d like to try it out.

You’ll want to provide a place on your site for people to subscribe to. For blogger, you feed is probably www.yoursite.blogspot.com/feed.xml. If your site doesn’t seem to have one, look at the options for Blogger, and you can turn on your feed.

So, now it’s time to get in the know and start reading feeds!