This post, by Marc Johnson, originally appeared on Longshot Publishing on 6/16/11.
Going indie has some drawbacks. One of those drawbacks is staying on top of the news. While I did that anyway especially in the Fantasy genre, with today’s publishing climate, I’ve had to do it a lot more. I’ve had to not only keep track of my preferred genre, but publishing as a whole. There are many good blogs and news sources out there, but how was I to keep track of them?
The last year and a half, I learned something about a little thing called RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. While I don’t understand the technical aspects, RSS really is simple.
Instead of constantly visiting and bookmarking all the websites I go to or leaving dozens of tabs open, I just use RSS. In most websites these days, they’ll be either a button that says subscribe like what I have in the upper right corner or they’ll be this picture. 
What RSS does is pull the news from the site. You’ll get their updated news feed whenever they update and you’ll see whatever images they post. In the case of some sites, you’ll no longer need to play the guessing game of when they update their site. It’s also helpful for podcasts and webcomics.
Read the rest of the post on Longshot Publishing.