You may have heard or seen of something called RSS, or noticed little orange buttons around the websites that mention RSS, syndication, Atom feeds and the like. RSS is a "feed" or a broadcast sent to you, and routed to your RSS "reader", software or a website that you can use to browse the news, views, reviews and opinions you choose to have sent to you.

This is not email; you must choose the sites you want to read and physically subscribe to. It is not spam; you can unsubscribe or end the feed at single mouse click.

But it also isn't browsing. Web pages come to you, instead of you going to them. They arrive in summary form, and you look at them when it pleases you - instantly, or an hour or a few days later.

Once you install an RSS reader on your computer, you are able to click that button and subscribe. Most likely, however, you must do this: Right click the RSS button. Scroll down and click Copy Shortcut. Go to your RSS software and find where you Open or Add an RSS feed. Once you do that, you no longer have to visit The Beaches to check on news updates. Your RSS reader will display all the headlines and the first paragraphs of each story. If you want more, just click and the full story opens up from the website, just as if you had gone there yourself.

The reason for RSS is simple: it's win-win. You get brief summaries of all websites and stories you want without waiting minutes or hours for those websites to load - only to learn there's nothing interesting there. The websites get more visits from you (through the RSS software) because you have more time to click only on what is interesting, rather than wandering the web more aimlessly.

SharpReader is an older program (as RSS goes), and does everything you want. Subscriptions are so easy to be almost automatic, and updates are shown as they arrive, for three seconds in a pop-up box on my screen, alerting you to new news. Snarfer, a fairly new RSS reader, reads Thai as well as English, and lets you subscribe even to web chats. You generally subscribe to RSS feeds by clicking or copying orange-coloured buttons like the one that has been enlarged for this example.

See SharpReader at www.sharpreader.net
See Snarfer run at www.snarfware.com