What you need to know about RSS feeds.
So, what are RSS feeds and why they are so popular among internet users and web designers?
Shortly speaking, RSS is a technology that lets you know about new information on different sites and blogs. Any user can sign on RSS feed and get the latest news and links to the information on the website. Depending on the version and specification of RSS the abbreviation means:
- Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
- RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9, 1.0 and 1.1)
- Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
There were only three ways to look after favorite website updates before RSS feeds become available:
1. To visit your favorite website daily/weekly to check if something new appeared. It is a waste of time if you have more than five favorites, especially if you find no interesting updates.
2. To receive via e-mail notifications about website updates. In this case spammers can find out your e-mail and you`ll receive additional advertisements.
3. To use a program to track page updates. This will determine interesting sites and their changes. Apart from downloading and installing you`ll never know what precisely has changed there.
And here comes RSS! The newest and best type of notifications about news or events on sites - RSS feeds. It is executed by means of a special page on your site which is called RSS-document, usually it is rss.Xml. This RSS-document does not contain any waste information such as site design or navigation menu. It basically consists of information on the latest website updates, the additional description of the news and the link to the source page. It should be known that one website can contain not only one RSS feed. It is often that apart from the main RSS feed one major site holds a lot of extra RSS channels with news for different site sections which gives the user more flexible choice if he does not wish to watch for all site news.
How to make RSS feed on a site? There are a lot of ways to generate RSS channels with their advantages and disadvantages. For instance, blogs can be used as such servers give links on RSS document of your blog, which you place on your site and get a "news channel". The other way is to make and manually edit the rss.Xml, for example, by means of Notepad ++. In this case you shall need a good knowledge of HTML and XML, and if the news will appear often, this method will turn to be very irksome. Thus the most convenient way is to use special RSS-generators, for example, RSS Channel Writer. It includes user-friendly tools like creator wizard, RSS editor, FTP manager, automatic RSS ping tool to RSS servers e t c. Being protected from making mistakes during RSS feeds creation, you don't need to possess with XML syntax knowledge to create RSS feed with this program.
In its turn, receiving and reading RSS feeds is maintained by means of RSS aggregators, either standalone (for example, free of charge FeedDemon), or integrated in a browser (IE7, IE8, Opera, Firefox). Such aggregators usually have fewer functions to work with RSS feeds in comparison with standalone programs` possibilities, but in case of using web browsers it is not needed to install any additional programs. Consequently the users are now ready to use RSS feeds, and web designers need only to use this possibility to involve in website community and to hold there more and more regular visitors.
About the Author:
Emergency Soft is the author of this article and producer of RSS Channel Writer software. The easiest way to create RSS channel is to use special RSS-generators like RSS Channel Writer. This is a powerful RSS feed creator, editor and submitter which will help you to create RSS feeds for you in seconds.
rss - technology that informs about new information on different sites and blogs
