What is RSS?

November 30th, 2006

What is it? I asked this same thing a few months ago because I saw it all over the place and had no idea what it was myself. So what exatcly is it? To save myself time from typing it all out here is a short snippet from Wiki that explains it pretty well and link for more detail on technical stuff:

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

Users of RSS content use programs called feed ‘readers’ or ‘aggregators’: the user ’subscribes’ to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

The initials “RSS” are variously used to refer to the following standards:

* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
* RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an “RSS feed”, “webfeed”, “RSS stream”, or “RSS channel”.

Source: Wiki

So what does this mean to you? In my case it meant that I didn’t ahve to go to 50 websites constantly all day because I could simply go there once and grab the RSS feed url from the site and put it into an RSS feed reader. I started out by using the Google Reader which is very nice and it can be added to your custom Google homepage if you so desire. Here is a quick tour of Google Reader.

Although Google reader is fantastic for me to keep up with all the news sources I read everyday, and is right on my Google Homepage where I can check my GMail, Yahoo! Mail, weather, etc., I still needed a bit more. If you use Firefox like many people are moving to you can download an extension that will run your RSS feed updates along the status bar at the bottom of the browser. I have situations online where I have to get to things fast, right when they come up so this is an absolute neccessity for me. This will be the InfoRSS extension that you need and you can find that download here: infoRSS extension download.

RSS is just one of those things that once you understand it you will wonder how you ever lived with out it. You can put thousands of feeds in here from sites all over the web and sort them with these readers very easily. Most sites will have an easily visible RSS button that almost always looks like this:

I would also recommend that if you do not have a Feedburner Feed that you get one instead of using the default RSS feed you get when you set up a blog. Feedburner has some amazing features that make our feeds look incredible and even allow us to do many extra things with them. The main thing that helps with Feedburner as well, is the fact that you can see the amount of subscribers you have for a blog by looking at your feeds on the site. It is great to see where people are coming from and how they have subscribed to your feeds. You can look at my RSS feed for an example and even subscribe to it too by clicking here. (Thanks for subscribing if you did.)

A feed can also be used where you see the term Atom. It serves the same purpose. More Firefox Extensions. Try and Ask Jason some tech questions too when you find that you are at a loss.

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Filed under: Computers and Internet, Firefox Extensions by JMH