• Update 2/21/07. You can subscribe to RSS feeds using Thunderbird.
• Update 2/22/07.  You can subscribe to RSS feeds for comments.

You might have noticed the orange icon on nearly every page of iMechanica. The icon stands for Really Simple Syndication, better known as RSS feed. You use a feed reader to subscribe to the feeds. The fead reader updatets the titles of the feed on your computer. You can view all the titles at a glance, with each title linking to the full post at a fast speed.

A free, considered by some the best, feed reader is Netvibes. Here is the procedure to set it up:

1. Go to http://www.netvibes.com/, and sign up.
2. Click "Add Content" at the upper-left corner.
3. Click "Add my feed" at the top of the sidebar on the left.
4. Paste http://imechanica.org/rss.xml into the box, and then click "add". Watch what happens.

You have added the feed of the front page of iMechanica to your feed reader. The front page is just one aggregate of posts, selected by the moderators.

You can also subscribe to the feed of all recent blog posts: http://imechanica.org/blog/feed

You can subscribe to other feeds. For example, click research in the header of iMechanica, and you will see recent papers characterized by their authors by the tag research. At the bottom of this page, you will see the orange icon. Click the icon, you land on an unsightful site. Ignore the sight, and copy the URL of the site. Then go back to Step 2 listed above.

A post is like an atom, and a feed a molecule. You can be a chemist to make your own molecules by discovering other ways to form feeds in iMechanica.

To find RSS feeds of web sites other than iMechanica, you can Google. For example, type in the search window the string: new york times RSS. Hit return and watch what happens.