What is RSS?

What is RSS? What can I do with it? These were my 2 first questions when I head about it! Lets look at it.

What is RSS?
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”.

Lets first look at an example of RSS in use. Lets say you have a web site and you publish lots of news on a very regular basis. In the “old” days ( I say old, which is actually the days before you heard of RSS!), a visitor to your web site would have to revisit your site every single time he wants to see whats new(s) on your web site. On the technical side, if somebody liked the articles you have on your web site and would like to publish your articles on their site, he first needed to contact you and make arrangements and some special development on his site to get your news on his site, or even worse, he would have to copy-and-paste your articles physically into his site!

Then you heard of RSS and decided to create a RSS Feed of your latest articles. You asked your web developer “Please RSS enable all my news articles!”. So your web developer write some interesting scripts that reads your news articles and formulate it in a standardized XML format, ready for the people in the world wide web to consume your RSS news feeds.

NOW the guy that used to visit you web site on a daily basis just to see if there is any new articles can copy your special RSS link into his favorite RSS reader and he can on a daily basis go check his reader for any new articles on a number of his favorite sites including yours. It will “download” the latest articles into his reader and saves him a lot of time and dissappointment of going to your site first and seeing “Oh dear, nothing new here…” and then decide later on “Oh dear, I’m not wasting another second on this guy’s web site. I’m not visiting it again!”.

The other guy that wants to publish your articles (with a link back to your site of course!) on his web site can now, without even contacting you, read your feed with some scripts on his site and display your latest articles on his site. He can do that easy, because he KNOWS the format that your feeds are in due to the standardized format of the RSS XML files.

Getting started
Get a RSS reader and subscribe to other sites feeds. This will help you see the value of RSS feeds best! There is quite a few readers out there that will help you manage your feed subscriptions. (Personally, I manage my feeds using the Firefox Web Browser. It has got a built in RSS reader and is one of the best web browsers available.) Download it at http://www.getfirefox.com

Now go surf the web for your favorite topics. Wherever you see a RSS icon, simply click on it and it will ask you if you would like to subscribe to this feed. Say yes!

Tommorrow, first thing you do when you are online is go to your bookmarks and check if there is any new sites listed in the feeds you subscribe to. If there is nothing new, you don’t have to waste time going to the site just to find out there is nothing new!

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3 Comments to "What is RSS?"

• Jaxson said: On 11/29/2006 at 11:13 am

  Problem with RSS Feed in WordPress.
  I have a subdomain that I installed wordpress for another blog site, but the subdomain site's rss feed points to my parent site.
  Can anyone come up with any suggestions?

• Stii said: On 11/29/2006 at 12:13 pm

  Hey Jaxson!

  How about some more info? Like the URL of your blog? Does it run in a sub domain?

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Semantic legalities said: On 03/20/2007 at 8:38 am

  [...] Yahoo! Pipes is another one that does something similar, but with RSS feeds. [...]

Spit it out!

Filed in: RSS, browsers, firefox, flock by: Stii