Started in November 2000, the independent resource has grown to include thousands of hints, tens of thousands of posts and hundreds of users—many of whom are notified of new hints via RSS.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an increasingly popular means of sharing content. Instead of manually checking for new articles, content consumers can use a news aggregator to check RSS-enabled Web sites for them. When there is a new article, press release or update, the user is notified automatically.

Feeds are typically brief descriptions with a link to the rest of the article. Feeds also can contain the entire article or news release with images.

Macosxhints publisher Rob Griffiths e-mailed that he doesn't know much about RSS other than the basics of viewing and subscribing to feeds. But he posted that "the RSS feed here is already the most-requested page."

Publishers for years have used e-mail notifications to alert subscribers of new content. But overflowing e-mail inboxes and the deluge of spam has greatly diminished the value of e-mail notices.

Publishers also run into a host of issues with the method, from e-mailing bounced addresses to ending up on the spam blacklists of subscribers who mistakenly block their legitimate e-mail.

Subscribers who forgot they signed up to receive e-mail notifications also have accused some publishers of being spammers when they get the requested (but forgotten) e-mail updates.

RSS avoids these e-mail issues. And its use by early adopters is exploding.

For example, in an April 2005 release, The New York Times Co. reported a 342 percent increase in page views for its RSS feeds from the previous March, and a 39 percent increase from February to March of this year.

Two telephone surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November 2004 established that 5 percent of online Americans, 6 million people, receive news and information from RSS aggregators.

"This is a first-time measurement from our surveys and is an indicator that this application is gaining an impressive foothold," project director Lee Rainie wrote in the report.

Further fueling the RSS trend is the recent release of Mac OS X Tiger 10.4. One of the more than 200 new features in the operating system is a renamed and updated version of the Apple Web browser, called Safari. As the name implies, Safari RSS has a built-in RSS newsreader with additional features to facilitate feed filtering, update notification and detection of RSS news feeds.

Click here to read about problems that Tiger has caused with creative workflows.

While most publishers don't have the resources of The New York Times, small but tech-savvy publishers can reap the rewards of RSS for free and for less effort than they may envision.

On Macosxhints, Griffiths uses Geeklog to publish OS X tips, track members and dynamically generate Web pages. Geeklog is a free and open-source content-management system that uses other open-source applications—Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL—on a shared hosting plan. Geeklog is just one of number of free and open-source content-management systems available.

Next Page: RSS can cause server bottlenecks.