OK I admit it, I have a very severe addiction to RSS. That is a very nasty condition (full name : Really Simple Syndication) where you can’t get enough news and information to sate your appetite. Unfortunately with a RSS feed list of 238 feeds, I am a terminal case! Hi, my name’s Mark and I’m a information junkie.

For those of you who have been hiding away in a cave for the past few years, RSS is how webmasters keep their visitors updated of new content to their sites (MakeUseOf has its own feed also) and RSS is good if you visit regular websites because it means you can stop wasting time going to those websites to see what’s new. Instead you can wait for the update to come in which normally has a direct link to the article on the website itself. Let’s face it, if I had to visit every one of those 238 websites every day, I would get nothing else done. By subscribing to the RSS feed, I can get all the updates in a constantly updating list and I can scan the titles to see which ones interest me the most.

There are many RSS feeders out there but I only have personal experience of two – My Yahoo and Google Reader. A lot of people swear by Bloglines but I am a Yahoo and Google fanatic at heart and so loyalty has kept me using only My Yahoo and then Google Reader.

Google Reader is the best though because of the different Firefox scripts you can give it such as the ones at UserScripts and UserStyles. Using these scripts, you can collapse the headers, widen the tables, change the design and much more. Google Reader can also be integrated with del.icio.us (again using a Firefox script) and also with Gmail, using the Better Gmail Firefox extension. This makes Google Reader my new best friend.

But the one web service I want to tell you about today is one where you can get your RSS updates emailed to you. I have Gmail open constantly but on the other hand, I only check my RSS feeds twice a day. So if anything really important was to come in on the RSS feed, I would see it quicker if it was emailed to me. That’s where RSSfwd comes in.

By going to the webpage and entering the RSS feed address and an email address, RSSfwd will email you with every new article that comes out on that feed when it is published. Plus if you have a large email account (such as Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail) then saving those emailed articles in an archive will allow you to build up a searchable database of information. Webpages come and go but your email account will hopefully be around a lot longer. Use Rssfwd to keep a record of the information you want to keep!