Sunday, January 20, 2013

What is RSS and What does it do?


Rather than go into detail about the composition of an RSS Feed, I will just give you some links that you can refer to.

For an encyclopedic answer, you can visit the RSS entry on WikiPedia. For the technophile, you can see details and history at XML.Com's entry on RSS. For a very brief FAQ with additional links, see What is RSS.

Now for my explanation. RSS is an acronym. Don't worry about what the acronym means. It's not important. An RSS Feed is a text file that contains data in a special format. Like a word document or an excel document, an RSS can be read, and is meaningful, to programs that understand that special format.

For Blog Readers

Bloggers create an RSS feed of their blog posts and make it available as a button or link on the site somewhere. An RSS link will usually look something like the icon to the right. Some sites may show icons for specific RSS readers, like Bloglines or GoogleReader.

An RSS Reader allows you to subscribe to all of your favorite blogs and see when the writer updates without having to actually navigate to each blog. It's like a little browser that goes out and checks for new blog entries for you.

The benefit of using RSS is that it saves you time. There are so many good blogs out there, not many people have enough time every day to go check on each and every one of them. It's especially annoying to keep checking on a blog that you really like and it not being updated as frequently as you would like. Get an RSS reader and let it tell you when the blog has been updated.

For Bloggers

An RSS Feed is built from your blog. Most blog hosting providers, like blogger.com or wordpress, will generate an RSS Feed for you. You can choose how much information goes into your feed. You can choose headlines only, headlines and summaries or full posts.

People disagree on what is best to put into your feed. My suggestion it to do what ever you prefer. It really all comes down to personal choice for any particular individual. I choose to use full feeds as I want my readers to be able to read my entire post as easily as possible.

Summary

So what is an RSS Feed for? Just what I mentioned above. People can subscribe to my feed, using an RSS reader, and see my posts almost as soon as I write them. They don't need to keep coming back to see if I have updated. It's a time saver for my readers. I also offer email subscriptions for the same reason.


   

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