You may have heard a lot about RSS feeds. Please believe me when I say they will make your life wonderful. Now FresnoBee.com's got RSS feeds, and this tutorial will show you how to use them.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article introducing what I call the "Custom Web," showing you ways to tweak your Web-surfing experience to suit your tastes. RSS takes the concept of the Custom Web to the next level.

Don't worry about what "RSS" stands for. All you need to know is that it pulls the latest postings from all your favorite blogs and Web sites into one place, letting you find out almost instantly whenever one of these sites is updated.

And it's so easy to do it's not even funny.

More and more Web sites are beginning to publish documents called RSS feeds, which you can think of as bulletins featuring all the latest items posted to a site. With a piece of software called an RSS reader, you can subscribe to any of these bulletins.

So the first step is choosing your RSS reader. You've got a ton of options, many of them free, so experiment with as many as you'd like. Very broadly, readers come in one of three flavors.

The first kind you can install on your computer like any other piece of software. If you're used to checking your e-mail with Outlook Express, you might like SharpReader, which looks very similar. If you're on a Mac, you might check out NetNewsWire.

The second kind of RSS reader works with applications you've already got. Pluck, for example, hooks right into Internet Explorer. And if you're using the latest version of Firefox, which I highly recommend, your browser's already got a built-in RSS reader. Just look for this little icon () at the bottom right-hand corner of the browser, and click it to have that site's feed delivered right to your Bookmarks folder.

The last kind of RSS reader is accessed over the Internet. This is my current favorite, because it keeps track of all my feeds, whether I'm home or at work or at a coffee shop, or wherever there's an Internet connection. I use one called Bloglines, which is probably the most popular. If you've got an account at my.yahoo.com, that page has a built-in RSS reader as well.

Once you've chosen an RSS reader, it's time to go huntin' for feeds. Go to all the blogs and Web sites you like to read regularly and check to see if they've got a feed. Again, if you've got Firefox, you can check by looking for the icon at the bottom right-hand corner of your browser. A lot of Web sites mark their feeds with an orange logo that says RSS or XML (), like the New York Times or the Beehive.

FresnoBee.com also recently got RSS feeds. The feed for the front page is http://www.fresnobee.com/front/index.xml. The one for the local news index is http://www.fresnobee.com/local/v-rss/index.xml, or change the "local" in that last link to point to whichever news index you'd like (for example, http://www.fresnobee.com/sports/bulldogs/v-rss/index.xml).

Every program gives you a different method of subscribing to feeds, but they're all pretty simple. With Bloglines, when I'm on any site with an RSS feed, I just click on a link in my Bookmarks folder, and voila! I'm subscribed.

This is just part one of my introduction to RSS. It'll let you do things much, much more powerful than what I've described. In part two (to appear June 1), I'll show you how to roll your own RSS feed for any Web page, make your own personal radio station for your MP3 player, plug into event calendars, and more. If you can't wait for June, Tim Yang has put together a number of greatly useful things to do with RSS.