This RSS stuff is awesome, that's why. And the how is much simpler than you might expect (or fear). Let me dissertate on the why for a moment more.
If there is ANY content on the internet that updates on anything resembling a periodic basis that you follow, be it a webcomic, a news site, or a Wowcraft blog, chances are it has an RSS feed. (Unless it's Dominic Deegan. I think Mookie avoids RSS just to annoy people : p.) Any individual post on a site will be an individual post in that feed.
You, the reader, can use an 'aggregator' to collect all these feeds from various sites and organize them for your consumption. It's like designing your own personalized internet newspaper. Some aggregators allow you to share posts from the feeds you read with other users of that aggregator, so if your friends find something funny or interesting, they can share it with you. Also, the aggregator will remember what you have and have not read, so if you go on vacation for a week and come back, you don't have to paw through a ton of sites trying to figure out what you've missed; the aggregator says "here's what's been posted since you were last here!" How handy.
Are you sold yet? If not, give this a whirl anyway. You just might find yourself hooked.
There are many aggregators available. Since I have my Gmails open all the time, I'm most familiar with Google Reader. If you're not a Gmail user, poke your email provider of choice and see if they have an aggregator available (I'm fairly certain Yahoo has something that will do the job); if not, consider searching for a plugin for your browser (Firefox has many such plugins). All my screenshots, however, are based out of my Gmail and Google Reader tabs.
In the upper lefthand corner of Gmail, there is a link to Reader.
Open this in a new tab, and you will see (a slightly larger version of) this.
No subscriptions in there just yet! Next, go to your favorite webcomic or Wowcraft blog, and look around for one of two things. Usually, what you should keep your eyes peeled for is the orange RSS icon, like this:
Most websites will have their RSS feed link somewhere within the top screen's worth of their site, and it shouldn't be hard to find. However, Blogger.com blogs (of which this is one) and Blogspot.com blogs are slightly different; you will want to scroll to the absolute very bottom of the main page (make sure you're not looking at a single post within a Blogger blog) and look for
"Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)".
(If you're looking at a single post, you will see "Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)". You very specifically do NOT want this! You will be subscribing to a feed of comment-replies to that post only, and while that could be educational, it's not really what you want.)
In either case, right click the RSS icon or the Posts Atom link, and choose "copy link location" or the equivalent command.
Then go back to your Reader or aggregator of choice.
Click the blue "Add Subscription" button and paste in your copied feed address.
Reader will query the server and import the last little chunk of posts for you to read and enjoy. Repeat for each site you read, and say goodbye to clunky, chunky bookmark lists and the hassle of trying to remember when your favorite webcomic or blog posts their updates.
You can also sort feeds into folders. In Google Reader, in the very lower left corner, click 'Manage Subscriptions', then click Add to a Folder, type in the folder name you want, and voila:
Any further Wowcraft blogs you add, you can simply drag them into that folder without going through Settings. If you have non-Wowcraft blogs, click 'Manage subscriptions' again and make a new folder for one, then go back to the main page and drag the others into the desired folder.
A nice thing that Reader does (others may or may not do this) is, if you had 5 blogs in your 'Wowcraft Blogs' folder and they each had 1 new post, you could simply click the folder itself to read all the new posts in that whole folder. Or, if a single blog has many new posts since the last time you read it, maybe you want to read each blog one at a time by clicking its name.
You can add dozens, even hundreds (if you're /really/ nuts and have nothing better to do than read RSS feeds alllll day) of feeds. Mmo-champion.com has an amazingly-difficult-to-find-a-link-for feed (general Wowcraft news, ie patch notes and commentary), and I also read TankingTips.com (a warrior-centered-but-not-entirely-exclusive blog that talks about tanking in Wowcraft). Some feeds put the entirety of their post right into the RSS post; some feeds only provide a teaser amount of information and you must control-leftclick the link to open the post's individual page in a new tab in order to read the content.
Livejournal communities also have built-in RSS feeds, with the following format:
http://community.livejournal.com/communityname/data/rss
Replace 'communityname' with the name of your comm, copy that into your Add Subscription, and away you go. Warning: while it's not technically true that "only open posts are viewable in this fashion", this post in LJ FAQs kind of went over my head.
Even a casually-used aggregator can save you lots of time and lots of brainspace. No longer do you need to try to recall how long it's been since you checked a certain blog for an update. No longer do you need to comb through three weeks of webcomic backlog, searching for the last strip you read, and spoiling yourself in the process. No longer do you need to sit on someone's site, hitting refresh until you see their new post. The aggregator does the footwork for you. Just input the feeds, organize them into folders as desired, and let it do its thing.
Happy Reading!
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