Nov
RSS - Everything you ever wanted to know about it.
by adminWhat is RSS?
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is a way that a visitor can subscribe to a sites content. This content could be blog articles, comments or podcasts. RSS is not limited to just blogs, any website can have an RSS feed.
By default, most blogging platforms have RSS capability built in. For example, WordPress has both post and comment feeds. This can readily be expanded to having seperate feeds for each category.
A popular addition to rss is the Feed Burner service. This is totally free and has many benefits. It is a lot more portable than the built in feeds and you are using their bandwidth not yours. In addition, with Google’s recent purchase of FeedBurner you will be able to monitize the feed with Adsense.
Viewing RSS
All you need to do is click on the rss icon to subscribe to a site’s feed. Next a page will usually appear asking you what you want to use to read that feed. There are many choices for you, but it boils down to each additional software, through the browser or via email.
1> RSS feed reader. There are many programs that you can get, both free and paid for, that you can download. They all have their pros and cons. However I would suggest using the Google feed reader. It is free, you just need a Google account. It’s main benefit to me is that you can view it from any computer as it is web-based. So if you are on holiday, away from your computer you can drop in on an Internet Cafe and catch up on the latest feeds.
2> Email. If you don’t like the idea of a feed reader then how about email? A lot of sites are now distributing the feed via email. The advantage of this is that you do not have to install anything or learn a new interface as you already get email.
3> Podcasts. I haven’t seen to many of these, but some sites offer their feed via pod-cast where you can either use a pod-cast streamer or download individual posts in mp3 format.
Advantages of RSS
- Saves Time. If you are currently visiting a lot of blogs, they may or not have a new article , this can take up a chunk of time. RSS will download all the latest articles from a site. It will also save you time by not having to download all the graphics and everything else, you’re just getting the pure content.
- More focused. Because it is only the pure content, there are less distractions while reading it.
- Ensure your privacy. You do not need to join each site’s email newsletter.
All in all, from both the visitor’s and webmaster’s point of view RSS is a very necessary technology to have and use.
Tags: email, feed burner, feed reader, podcast, RSS, rss feed, subscribe, wordpress
Category Blogging |
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RSS has allowed me to not only read my favorite blogs without actually having to visit each individual website, but it also allows me to read them at places other than home–from web-based feed readers such as Google. Which is useful because a lot of times you don’t want to visit each individual blog, and distract yourself (or possibly others) with all the graphical content on the blog.
On the other hand, it also works out well for bloggers too because more often than not, when I read an interesting post on an RSS feed, I want to make a comment so that takes me to their actual blog. I admit years ago I didn’t understand RSS, or what the significance of it was, but now it’s clear as day.
I, agree. Without rss I would not be able to read anywhere near the number of sites and blogs that I do now. But it really irritates me when it is only a partial feed.
Colin King’s last blog post..Install a web server and Wordpress
Nice summary, Colin. I read on your BZ comments that you’re planning on a follow up post. I look forward to reading it.
THX. It’s coming soon, there are a couple more things I need to find to complete the post.