RSS readers enable you to keep updated on your favorite blog writers on starwars.com automatically. A RSS reader is special software that acts like a web browser but it can access content for you in the background and alert you when new content becomes available that you're interested in reading about.

By subscribing to RSS feeds, you will get popup alerts when new content arrives so you don't have to go back and manually check for new content. Some sites choose to post the entire article in the feed, while others like starwars.com provide only a synopsis for busy readers. Most RSS readers also have a built-in web browser so you can view the entire article without leaving the RSS reader.

However, not all RSS readers are created equal. My favorite one for Windows is the SharpReader created by Luke Hutteman. It is feature rich and best of all it is FREE. Opera also includes a decent RSS reader in their ad sponsored web browser but it's not as feature rich as SharpReader.

Most RSS readers allow you to sort your content in interesting ways such as by category, author, or date and much more. They also can track which articles you're read.

The Mozilla Firefox browser also has a nifty feature called Live Bookmarks:

"Live Bookmarks is a new technology in Firefox that lets you view RSS news and blog headlines in the bookmarks toolbar or bookmarks menu. With one glance, quickly see the latest headlines from your favorite sites. Go directly to the articles that interest you-saving you time."

starwars.com offers the following feeds so you can keep up to date with content that interests you:

* all blogs:
http://blogs.starwars.com/rss

* individual categories, e.g. gaming category:
http://blogs.starwars.com/category/4/rss

* individual blogs, e.g. Ghent's blog:
http://blogs.starwars.com/ghent/rss

Just look for the XML icon on the title bars for available RSS feeds.

RSS feeds can also be used to syndicate content across multiple web sites (e.g. fan sites); but that's another story...