What Is RSS and Why Should You Care? at eJoneClicks.com

What Is RSS and Why Should You Care?

Published by eJone 2 years, 7 months ago in Click Tech, Click Facts Tags: aggregator, bloglines, browser, newsfeed, rss, syndication, webfeed.

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?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and to simply put, it’s just another way for publishers to deliver/syndicate/distribute content. An “RSS feed” refers to the content being delivered, and is not commonly viewable on web browsers as it produces different code i.e. 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?

Think of RSS as a newspaper. Everyday, you buy the paper and get the news. RSS works the same way, only it’s free and you don’t have to wait a day. Instead of going to the news stand and buying the paper, you get an RSS reader and give it “feeds”.

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:

The usual colour for RSS chicklets is usually orange although they have also appeared in blue (like on my site) and in extremely rare occasions, pink!

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.

RSS readers are gradually being added to portal sites such as Yahoo and Google. Even the recent versions of Safari and Opera web browsers already have RSS reading feature built in while it is said that the next version of Internet Explorer (version 7) will also follow suit.

The FireFox web browser has already support for RSS via Live Bookmarks, but it’s not quite the same and I would recommend downloading the Sage feed reader extension. Sage operates out of the bookmarks manager, and you can set bookmarks to RSS feeds. When you click on a feed, it pulls the recent items into your browser window in a nice array of boxes. Live Bookmarks is different (as far as i can tell) in that it pulls the subject lines into the side panel; you don’t get a way to read all the blurbs at once, you have to click a title to go to that page. Or better yet, download the Google Toolbar for a complete single-click integration with Google Reader.

The latter is an online feed reader. It’s fairly new but already gaining a lot of popularity among RSS subscribers. Another extremely popular online feed reader is Bloglines. Preetam Rai has an extensive article on how to use the service from Bloglines along with colour illustrations. Andy Wibbels has gone a step further and created 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.

If Bloglines have problems reading the feeds of a particular site or one of your own, it won’t try reading it again for another 24 hours. This 24 hour delay, is called the Bloglines Penalty Box.

You can also download software to read RSS feeds. I can highly recommend FeedDemon for Windows and 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.