What’s RSS all About?

By PChip | Category: Webmaster Tips |

Time to educate folks that have no idea what RSS means. As is the case with many of the confusing web related acronyms and terms, Wikipedia is a great place to turn for a really good definition. Check out their entries on RSS and Web Feed if you want a full size description. I think it’s a good place to start - especially if you want to know the detailed side of RSS. In this post, I’m giving you the less techy picture.

Layman’s Terms: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a method used to subscribe to a website feed so you don’t have to go visit the website to read the latest content. Instead of going to each of your favorite sites individually you can collect all the RSS feeds of each of these sites in one place. Then by using feed reading software or a website you can read all the latest articles from the one place where you’ve consolidated your feeds. This makes it more efficient for you to gobble up your favorite content in less time! RSS feeds are not limited to blogs; many web-space owners provide feeds for their website and almost any media content online such as music, video, and audio files too!

Behind the syndication feed is the XML language. If you know nothing about coding webpages and such then this will just confuse you, so for now I’m going to skip the tecky noise and skip to the fun part!

The best way to learn is by practice and example so let me tell you about how I use RSS. There are basically two options available to you when it comes to reading feeds. You can purchase software, install it on your computer and read your feeds from there AND/OR you can use an online feed reader and see your feeds from any computer you are using to connect to the web. My preferred method is this second option.

Option 1 - Feed Reading Software: There is a ton of feed reading software available if you want to read your feeds on your own computer. They all basically act the same way and they each have a fairly low learning curve. Once you have followed the directions that come with your software and you’ve subscribed to your first feed, it usually becomes very easy. If you get really stuck try the help menu or check out the software company’s website for guidelines. To find yourself a comfortable feed reading package simply run a Google search for RSS reader that will bring up many options. RSSOwl is one that comes highly recommended by several of my online buddies. Mainly because it is free, light weight and functional for what most folks want. There are prettier and more functional feed readers out there and I’ll leave it up to you to choose your favorite.

Option 2 - Web Based Feed Reading: With a standalone software feed reader like RSSOwl you have to be on the computer you installed the software on in order to have access to your feeds. Because of this limitation many people choose to use a web based feed reader. One of the most popular is Bloglines. Bloglines works much like feed reading software except that because it is entirely based on the Internet, you can access your syndicated feeds online from any computer connected to the web. You can also share your feeds with other people or search other people’s feed lists to see what is popular. Personally I use the feed reading options that Yahoo offers, because I use a “My Yahoo” page for my homepage on my computers both at work and at home. This way I see my feeds from the kazillion of sites I’m interested in, everytime I log on. And I have them sorted by page tab to make life really easy!

Subscribing to a Blog: Most blogs make it super easy to find their feed. They will provide you with a link and/or a button that leads to their feed. For example you can subscribe to the DSD-Pro feeds using the links or the orange RSS buttons near the top right corner of our web pages. To subscribe to our feed all you do is click the button/link and then choose the feed reader you use from the feedburner list that’s provided. If you don’t use one that’s listed, then click the View Feed XML option from the list. The actual feed webpage will pop up and you can cut/paste the URL from your address bar into your feed reading software or into another web based reader like bloglines. If you do the cut/paste thing you may also have to name the feed and strangely enough this feed, DSD-Professionals, is what you’d call your feed from our site. By the way our feed addy link is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Dsd-professionals.com - and if you click it you will get the XML output of this blog. That’s the stuff I told you about that you don’t really need to understand, but go ahead and take a look by clicking the link if you are interested.

Note that we use a special third party service called FeedBurner that adds extra features to my feed output. The most important of which is that it provides us with statistics on how many people subscribe to my blog. This is an important goodie for any business-blogger to have!

Almost all blog owners will have RSS links available for you to use to subscribe to their site. It might be called Atom, RSS, or Syndicate, but they all do the same thing. Some sites (like ours) offer feeds for several types of content on their website. For example we offer a feed for our main postings, one for folks who like to follow ALL the comments that come in, and others for our audio and podcasts as well. We also offer the option for readers to subscribe to individual postings. For example if you wanted to just follow the comments for this specific post only - you could use the feed found near the top of this posting, just below the title.

That’s it in a nutshell. Avid web surfers use RSS feeds to make their life easier and access the info much quicker. Business-bloggers use them to offer a service to their readers AND to track stats for marketing, etc. It’s such a handy tool to have around… don’t you think?!

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