People sometimes complain that reading iMechanica takes time.  This is because iMechanica has a large number of pages, and new pages are added frequently.  If you go directly to iMechanica, you have to load individual pages one by one.  

RSS feeds provide a perfect solution.  It is very easy to set up on your computer a RSS feed reader.  If you look at the reader once a day, say, all the new posts are right in front of you at a single click.  Better yet, you can use the same reader to subscribe to full text of The New York Times, abstracts of Nature, titles of JMPS...  The service is completely free.  Learn to subscribe to RSS feeds today.

I run part of the website here at the IMechE in the UK. Since we have many international visitors to our technical events I thought I'd point out that we've finally brought out a whole raft of RSS goodness with the launch of a range of industry specific feeds from our calender of events. We intend to launch more feeds for other content areas soon.

Say you have learned how to subscribe to RSS feeds using a feed reader, or an email account. You are ready to create your own RSS feeds.

A post is like an atom, and a feed a molecule. You can be a chemist to create your own molecules by discovering ways to form feeds. Here is the basic chemistry.

Atoms

As the number of comments increases rapidly, how can anyone keep up? One answer is to use a RSS reader. The service is free, and takes 5 minutes to set up. It allows you to see all new comments at a glance, without clicking on individual ones. Once you have set up your Google Reader, paste the URL for the feed of comments http://imechanica.org/crss

You can receive posts and comments by email. They are faster than uploading webpages. They come into folders other than your regular emails, so you don't need to look at the posts if you have no time.

I use Thunderbird. Other email applications might have the similar feature. (If your email applications do not have this feature, you can always set up a feed reader.)

Almost all articles in the New York Times are free online, for about a week, and then go behind the pay wall. However, NYT permits readers to generate permanent links to individual articles. Here is a link generator created by Aaron Swartz. Paste the URL of an NYT article into the box, and click "Go". You will see a the URL of the permanent link to the article. You should use this permanent link in your blog posts.

You can now subscribe to RSS feeds of comments, as follows:

• For all new comments made on iMechanica, the feed is: http://imechanica.org/crss
• For comments on a particular post, say post number 474, the feed is: http://imechanica.org/crss/node/474
  
  

I subscribed to the RSS of iMechanica and somebody’s blog in my RSS reader--netvibes. But it feed me a little. Today’s hot topic is Huang’s “from students’ perspective”, and lots of comments follow and will continue to follow tomorrow or the days after tomorrow. When I check my netvibes, it only tells me new topics, but not new comments. But actually, sometimes we want to track the update of several specific topics instead of browsing every topic. Moreover, someone posts new comments on some topics, but I cannot obtain the feed of comments from him/her. So if iMechanica can supply feed for the topics and for all of the updated posts of users, it will be very useful. It improves the efficiency and it is the gist of RSS.

What is RSS feed?
Really Simple Syndication, better known as RSS feed, updates posts and comments on your computer. To read RSS feeds, you will need to set up a feed reader, such as Google Reader.

Sample iMechanica feeds:

• Front page, http://imechanica.org/rss.xml
• All comments, http://imechanica.org/crss

You can also create your own feeds of iMechanica.

Other useful feeds: