What is RSS feed?
You might have noticed the orange icon on many pages 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 feed reader updates 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.

How to set up a feed reader?
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.

Other feed readers

• You can subscribe to RSS feeds using Thunderbird. Is is slower than netvibes and Google Reader, but it is integrated with your email client.
• Google Reader has become an excellent RSS feed reader.

How to find RSS feeds?
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.

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.

RSS feeds of iMechanica:
A post is like an atom, and a feed a molecule. You can be a chemist to make your own molecules by discovering ways to form feeds in iMechanica. Some of popular feeds are listed below.

• The front page: http://imechanica.org/rss.xml
• All blog posts: http://imechanica.org/blog/feed
• Posts with at least one tag:, e.g., http://imechanica.org/taxonomy/term/308/0/feed. This example is for tag number 308, "lecture notes". To find out the number of a tag, click the tag anywhere on iMechanica, read off the number in the URL.
• A forum works like a tag. For example, the Computational Mechanics Forum has the tag number 357, and its RSS feed is http://imechanica.org/taxonomy/term/357/0/feed
• Posts with at least one tag in a set of tags. For example, the feed http://imechanica.org/taxonomy/term/357+445/0/feed gives you feeds of posts of both the Computational Mechanics Forum (357), and Technology Corner (445).
• Posts with a set of common tags. For example, the feed http://imechanica.org/taxonomy/term/527,528,529/0/feed gives you all posts of a course I taught, with tags ES 241 (Tag number 527), Advanced Elasticity (Tag number 528), and Spring 2007 (Tag number 529).
• You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for comments.

Tag numbers for channels featured in the header of iMechanica

• Research 76,
• education 128,
• classic 346,
• mechanician 75,
• opinion 77,
• industry 118,
• conference 74,
• job 73,
• tip 135,
• video 437.

Tag numbers for forums

• Ask iMechanica 109,
• Biomechanics Forum 362,
• Computational Mechanics Forum 357,
• Contact Mechanics Forum 596,
• Experimental Mechanics Forum 361,
• Fluid Mechanics Forum 440,
• Integrated Structures Forum 363,
• Materials Forum 390,
• Mechanics Course Forum 374.