Help: What do the orange icons mean?

On various pages of this site, not to mention on millions of sites across the Web, you will find an orange badge that looks like this:

Sometimes you’ll see rectangular badges with “XML”, “RSS”, “Atom”, or other acronyms.

What these mean is that you can subscribe to that particular page using a program called an aggregator, sometimes referred to as a “news reader.” Aggregators enable you to keep track of dozens or even hundreds of websites as easily as checking your email.

There are a bunch of different aggregators available for Mac, Linux, and Windows, as well as free web-based services. You can learn more about aggregators at Wikipedia, or see a list of aggregator programs.

Modern webbrowsers usually have aggregation built in (e.g. Firefox, Safari, etc.) -- check your browser documentation to see if this is the case.

On some websites, there is only one feed available. Others, like the RIMS CTAP site, have multiple feeds in addition to the front-page news feed.