|
What the heck is RSS? Well RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Read on learn about the benefits of RSS and what it can do for you or your website. Best of all, it's easy to use and saves you A LOT OF TIME!
The Basics of RSS: RSS is simply a file format based on XML that is universally recognized and used by any RSS program. RSS is used to people to distribute and read a live feed. This live feed is just like the video feeds, or audio feeds that you see at other websites. RSS however is more often used as a NEWS FEED or for use of distributing text content instead of multimedia content. How RSS is used: An author of a specific content wants to make his information available to everyone. Having a website is not enough because not everyone will want to visit his content everyday. So instead, he makes a live RSS content feed that everyone can subscribe to.
Most websites like Yahoo will make their news content to be in RSS format so that others can subscribe to their news format. To really understand how RSS works, just try it yourself. It takes 10 minutes and will save you tons of time for the rest of your life. Many websites today regardless of the type make their website RSS-compatible. Soon you will recognize the orange RSS logo no matter where you go. The benefits of RSS:
- You can use one RSS reader program and subscribe to multiple different websites. Imagine how much time you'd save by having all the headlines from 30 different sites in your reader instead of having to surf through 30 different websites. RSS is a big time saver!
- For a webmaster making his content RSS, it increases the chances that your content will be made more public. People who are too lazy to visit your site can subscribe to it and still read your information. Using RSS will allow other websites to show your content on their site. What program can I use to read RSS: There are tons of great free RSS readers out there. There is no point in buying one unless you really want or need all the features. I for one, like to use Omea Reader. It's available from JetBrains HERE .  [You can see how I've subscribed to many different RSS feeds. The names of all the different feeds show on the bottom left window. The titles of the content in the middle window. And the intro text for the content show in the right window. If something interests me I can doubleclick on the title name to get forwarded to the actual content page. Cool, huh? Using Omea Reader or any other RSS reader is easy. There are several methods that work in almost all RSS programs:
To subscribe to an RSS feed
1) Go to the website page that has the RSS or XML logo on it.
A good example would be: http://www.tomshardware.com/site/rss.html Or even From here you can open up your RSS reader program, and click Subscribe. A window should come up asking you for the address of the RSS feed you want to subscribe to, from here you just paste in the RSS URL like the one above and hit enter.
2) You can also open up your RSS reader program and type subscribe and just type in the URL of the website you'd like to subscribe to, and the program may be able to find the RSS feed URL automatically. ENJOY! What can I use to put other RSS feeds on my website: This is called a parser. There are tons of free scripts out there that can you can use to post RSS content from other website onto your own. This is a great idea because it makes your website so much more informative without you having to do anything. If you have a CMS system for your website, this is much easier. What can I use to create my own RSS feed: There are RSS creator/editor programs that you can use. Again, if you have a CMS system for your website, this is much easier. Many CMS systems out there can activate your entire webpage as an RSS feed simply by enabling an option.
 |
Networking 
