RSS feeds will speed up your monitoring of all the sites you like. It begins with clicking the RSS button just below Tip of the Week. But it doesn’t end there.

First, you will need a free RSS reader, I use Google Reader to monitor over 1000 various feeds around the web.

Google Reader is a tool for gathering, reading, and sharing all the interesting blogs and websites you read on the web. This guide can help you familiarize yourself with the main features of Google Reader so that you can get started subscribing to and sharing feeds.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are a way for websites to distribute new content as it becomes available. Think of an RSS feed as a file that contains a blog or website’s most recent entries. By subscribing to a site’s feed in Reader, you will automatically be notified when that website contains new posts or entries. Instead of checking sites repeatedly for updates, RSS feeds bring your favorite websites to you!

An RSS feed can be identified by this universal symbol. When you see it on a website, clicking will usually direct you to that site’s feed. From there, you can either copy and paste the link to subscribe to the feed in Reader, or in the case of many browsers, click a button to subscribe directly.

As I use Google Chrome for browsing on the web, I installed the RSS Subscription Extension for Chrome and this this extension auto-detects RSS feeds on the page you are reading and upon finding one will display an RSS icon in the Omnibox, allowing you to click on it to preview the feed content and subscribe. The extension comes with 4 feed readers predefined (Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines and My Yahoo) but also allows you to add any web-based feed reader of your choice to the list.

If you find yourself repeatedly visiting a website to check for updates, or if you just stumble across a page you want to keep track of, you can easily subscribe to it in Google Reader using the subscribe bookmark. To use the subscribe bookmark, simply drag the link below to your bookmarks bar. Then, when you’re on a web page, you can click the bookmark to view it in Google Reader. Once you see the feed preview, confirm your subscription by clicking the “Subscribe” button within Reader.

See the video on how to do it and why you should do it.