A few of my friends asked me what RSS was when they saw my FeedBurner chicklet at the top right-hand corner on a few of my websites. I’m sure that most of you have come across it yourself on other websites. You’ve probably even heard or seen “RSS Feeds” being mentioned a lot in the online publishing world and/or blogging community (i.e. TypePad, Wordpress, Blogger, etc.).

So what is RSS? What’s so important about it? Do you need it?

[1] XML instead of HTML.

The internet contains (literally) billions of websites and it can get a bit overwhelming trying to keep up with all the ones you’re interested in. So rather than visiting your favourite websites (from your bookmarks) and clicking from site to site, wouldn’t it be easier to have all the latest news and updates delivered to you instead?

Not all websites currently offer RSS feeds, but it is certainly growing rapidly in popularity.

A site that offers RSS feeds will often have a clickable promotional graphic (or chicklet) like the ones shown below:

Sounds good. How do I start reading RSS feeds?

You need an RSS reader (also known as feed readers, feed aggregators or news readers). Don’t worry, it’s not much different to using an email software. Adding a site’s RSS feed to your reader is called “subscribing”; i.e. it’s a subscription. You can have as many subcriptions as your reader will allow it.

[3] Safari and [4] Opera web browsers already have [5] Internet Explorer (version 7) will also follow suit.

The FireFox web browser has already support for [6] RSS via Live Bookmarks, but it’s not quite the same and I would recommend downloading the [7] Sage feed reader extension. Sage operates out of the bookmarks manager, and you can set bookmarks to [8] Google Toolbar for a complete single-click integration with [9] Google Reader.

The latter is an online feed reader. It’s fairly new but already gaining a lot of popularity among [10] Bloglines. Preetam Rai has an [11] extensive article on how to use the service from Bloglines along with colour illustrations. Andy Wibbels has gone a step further and created [12] a video demo on how to use the Google Reader service. I would recommend going through these two guides before deciding which to go for.

You can also download software to read [13] FeedDemon for Windows and [14] NetNewsWire for Mac OS X. These two are very popular news readers that can be installed on your computer. Unfortunately, unlike their online counterparts, these software aren’t free and will require you to install software on your computer.

The methods to subscribe to a particular RSS feed will depend on the RSS reader you’re using. More often than usual, it will just require you locating the RSS chicklet and copying the address over to your reader.

How do I start publishing RSS feeds on my blog?

Most blogging platforms like TypePad, WordPress, Blogger, etc. have this already enabled. You may not even realise that you’re already delivering content via RSS.

Blogger has adapted a common RSS feed address for all their users; it’s your Blogger address plus an extra “/atom.xml” at the end i.e. http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Those on TypePad, WordPress and other commonly-used blogging platform will find an RSS link somewhere on the template they’re using.

Try it.