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What is RSS?
As you travel around the Net you may see little orange icons that say things like 'RSS 2.0' or 'Atom' or 'XML' and you might wonder what those are.
Those icons mean that the site you are visiting is syndicated. And THAT means that you can add the feed from that site into a news aggregator of some kind.
More on those later.
So what is it anyway?
Basically, it means you can add a website's 'feed' to some software that will automagically let you know as soon as that website is updated. RSS feeds are primarily used with blogs, news sites and podcasts.
There are numerous kinds of newsreaders you can use to keep track of a feed. Everything from using your email software, to using Firefox to collect the data.
My favourite one is called 'Feedreader.' It's free, quick to install and does everything I want it to do which is just tell me when something is updated. Sure there are better ones available but you have to pay for those and I'm a cheapskate.
Once you install feedreader (or similar) on your computer, you can then start adding feeds. You just add the web address (URL) of the site's feed and the software does the rest.
How do you know the feed's web address? Those little orange icons you've been spotting usually are linked to it.
For example, my icon in the right column is linked to my feed address which is invirtuallife.blogspot.com/atom.xml. Click on 'add feed' in your newsreader and paste that URL in and let the software do the rest.
From then on, whenever I add a new entry to this blog, you'll get a message letting you know IVL's been updated. Nifty!
A couple of tips:
Most (not all, but most) Blogspot blogs will have an atom feed (providing the blog author has turned it on in their settings) so if you have a favourite blogger using Blogspot, put in their URL and add the 'atom.xml' to the end of it to see.
Most major news sites such as CNN offer RSS syndication so you can get your breaking news as it happens.
So now when you see those weird little orange icons on a site, you should know what they mean :) I love syndication myself because it cuts down on time I'd normally be spending surfing to each and every website I visit on a regular basis. Now I just let FeedReader run and it lets me know when any of them have been updated and I can go on to do bigger and better things :)
Any questions or help with syndication, just pop me a comment.
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