What Is RSS and How Is It Used?

Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 12:58 am

RSS – The Basics

In a nutshell RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is used to syndicate or subscribe to the feed of a website, blog or just about any media content online (this includes articles, music, video or just about any other digital media).

By syndicating you subscribe to the feed of the site which means you do not have to actually visit the website to read the updated and most recent content. Instead you use feed reading software or a website like Google Reader to read the latest articles. Instead of going to each of your favorite blogs individually you can collect all the feeds of the sites (provided they make them available) in one place. The purpose of syndication is to therefore make it easier for you to consume the content from your favorite sites in less time.

Even if you are not tech savvy you don’t need to know much about XML. It’s basically the formatting language that software and websites use to distribute the content to your feed reader. If you know nothing about HTML then you probably don’t really need to know much about XML either. Just understand that behind syndication is the language XML.

The best way to learn is by practice and example so let me tell you exactly how I use RSS.

Web Based Feed Reading

With standalone software feed readers you have to be on the computer you installed the software to in order to have access to your feeds. Because of this limitation many people choose to use a web based feed reader and the most popular is Bloglines. Bloglines works much like feed reading software except 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.

I personally use Google Reader.

Subscribing to a Blog

To continue with my example, I of course subscribe to my own feeds, the RSS of this and other blogs I own. At the top right corner you will see an orange RSS link button. To subscribe to my feed all you do is copy and paste that link into feed reading software or a web based reader like bloglines. You may also have to name the feed. This feed is called “Gayla Baer”. The RSS feed link for this site looks like this – http://feeds.feedburner.com/gaylabaer – 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 take a look by clicking the link if you are interested. I use a third party service called FeedBurner that adds features to my feed and it provides me with statistics on how many people subscribe to my blog.

All blogs will have a link which you can subscribe to. It might be called Atom, or RSS, or simply Syndicate, but they all do the same thing.

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