What is RSS?

What is RSS?

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content to a wide number of people. It is used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format

What is RSS Feed?

An RSS document is called a "feed", "web feed", “RSS Feed” or "channel". A RSS Feed generally includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates, authorship, key words and other related details. 

 

Why RSS? 

Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. With the increase of dynamic websites (dynamically changing content) it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of content on these sites. News websites, live updates on sports, product information pages and Blogs are a few dynamic sites to quote. RSS is a solution to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you in a well organized format.

  

 

How does RSS work?

The best way to answer this question will be to quote Software Gardens, Inc's response to this question in their tutorial for RSS. RSS works by having the website author maintain a list of notifications on their website in a standard way. This list of notifications is called an "RSS Feed". People who are interested in finding out the latest headlines or changes can check this list. Special computer programs called "RSS aggregators" have been developed that automatically access the RSS feeds of websites you care about on your behalf and organize the results for you. (RSS feeds and aggregators are also sometimes called "RSS Channels" and "RSS Readers".)

Producing an RSS feed is very simple and hundreds of thousands of websites now provide this feature, including major news organizations like the New York Times, the BBC, and Reuters, as well as many weblogs.The RSS information is placed into a single file on a website in a manner similar to normal web pages. However, the information is coded in the XML computer language for use by a program (the RSS aggregator) and not by a person like a normal web page.

What are the best RSS readers available?

We’d suggest you read the article at Makeuseof.com. It lists the ten best RSS readers such as Xnews, Snarfer, Grabit, FeedDemon, RSSBandit, Omea Reader and others. However, if you want our tip, then go for Google reader. 

How do I find out if a website has an RSS feed?

If you can recognize a RSS icon, you can immediately recognize the sites having RSS feed. Generally the sites offering RDD feed display the RSS feed icon/button on the front page.   These buttons are often linked directly to the   RSS feed file itself. Once you know the URL of an RSS feed, you can provide that address to an RSS aggregator or reader program and have the Reader monitor the feed for you. As an added advantage, most RSS Readers have preconfigured list of feeds to choose from.

How the RSS is feed file produced?

The RSS Feedfile  is generally an extended Markup Language (XML) file with the extensions as .RSS or .XML and are in web syndication format. Weblogs tools like Blogger, LiveJournal, Wordpress and Content Management System (CMS) such as Joomla or Drupal come with inbuilt RSS Feed generators. However, Independent site such as News site and others need to code the RSS generator programs.

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