Ok, an admission up front, I love RSS and what it enables so the following post is going to be biased, perhaps even evangelical. There are some drawbacks with RSS, I am sure there must be because everything has its faults, but I am only going to tell you about all the good things.
Although RSS has been around for a long time, I get asked every week about what it is and why I talk about it a lot. The thing is, I am not completely au fait with how it works technically. I just know that in terms of serving and finding information it has opened up a whole new world.
What I know about RSS - the technical bits:
- RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication"
- It enables feeds (like the old-fashioned news wire feeds) from your site to be read in NewsReaders.
- It uses XML
- It is most useful on sites that have a high content turnover. Completely useless on sites that don't.
- RSS also allows headlines from your site to be displayed on another site with no hard manual labour.
What I know about RSS - the user-side bits:
- RSS enables me to read headlines through a NewsReader (I use NetNewsWire because I use a Mac most of the time)
- I don't surf the net much anymore but get feeds from a selection of sites that I find either incredibly useful or incredibly entertaining.
- I can stay up to date with news, what's going on in the blog world, the footy scores, all through one program without me actually having to remember where the stuff is on the web.
- RSS feed reading is incredibly addictive if you're a bit of a smart-**** like me who likes to get the news before anyone else, just for the hell of it.
- If you want to see if a site has a feed you look for something that says 'XML', 'Subscribe' or 'RSS'. Sometimes they use an image like this:
Where you can find out more:
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