When you think about all the information on the web today, news, sports, blogs, marketing, stocks and share, the average person is hard pressed to visit each and every website on a daily basis. To make life a whole lot easy, this is were RSS Feeds come into play.
What you ask is RSS? Basically without getting into technicalities, RSS is an XML based format which allows the syndication of lists of hyperlinks along with other information (metadata) thus enabling the viewer to decide what link they wish to follow. Simply huh?
RSS feeds allow your to fetch and understand the information so that all the lists you are interested in can be personalized and tracked - your computer does all the work for you! Rather than having to go to each individual web-page, all your favs come to you!
To enable your computer to do all the work, a web site will create a feed (channel) available, just like any file/resource on the server. Then your computer will go over on a regular basis and fetch all the latest information from that list. It is a great way to syndicate your site and is particularly popular with bloggers!
By syndicating all you have to do is to subscribe to that site and there you have it, all the latest news right there on your computer. It really does make life so much easier.
To enable you to actually read all the news, you do need some software. Now there are a number of programs available, some are web-based which means you can read the latest news from any computer, or there are standalone programs which you install on your computer and can of course, only be used when you are actually on that particular computer. I personally use RSSOWL not only is it very user friendly lightweight and completely free. It is a bit of a learning curve at first, like everything but play around with it, if you get really stuck there is always the help section:).
All blog sites will have a RSS Feed, it maybe called Atom or RSS or just plain Syndicate but the name means nothing really as they all do exactly the same thing. The reason for all the different names is because there are different standards to create syndication services - remember the old Beta vs VHS video battle. At present it would appear that RSS is winning the war and that is the one you will see most often.
So why not make this site your first feed!
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2 comments:
Google Reader just added a cool rss feature. You can translate the language of a feed. I have'nt tried it yet, but apparently it works quite well.
Thank you, have also heard its cool. Have been very busy with another project, will check it out now.
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