What is RSS ? A newbie’s guide !

Have you ever wondered what is all that RSS, XML, Syndication is ? Well, you are not different from anyone of us a few days, months or years ago. I will explain what is RSS. This is a newbie’s guide to RSS and how it is built and what are its advantages.

The Basics

RSS is a short form of Really Simple Syndication. To subscribe to RSS means to syndicate, or to subscribe to the site’s feed. By subscribing to a RSS feed of a site, you no longer have to visit the site to read the latest articles posted. You can read them at your disposal from a RSS reading software. We’ll talk about the different kinds of RSS readers available in a moment. If you visit many websites on a daily basis, RSS maybe your best online friend. You can read the updates posted on many different sites without even having to visit them.

So, how does a RSS feed look like ? The image you see on the top is the standard image for a RSS feed. Most of the websites use this icon, though some of them have it in slightly fancier styles. A general RSS link would look like this.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/tipslab

If you click on it, you’ll be presented with a list of RSS readers with which you want to read the feed.

Feed Readers

There are two kinds of feed readers you can use. The online feed readers and the feed reading software. One of the most famous online feed readers is Bloglines. It lets you add and categorize the feeds in many different ways. It is just like the feed reading software, except that it is completely based on the internet. Perhaps, the most important area in which the online feed readers win over the feed reader software is that you don’t need to be on the system on which you have installed the software. You can virtually access your feeds from any system in the world.

RSSOwl is a very famous feed reading software. As with any other software, there is a learning curve associated with this. But, once you have setup your feeds, its pretty much easy managing your feeds and reading them. If you are a person who always uses a specific computer to browse the internet, using a feed reading software might be useful for you. It saves you time and energy to login to a online feed reader. Phew, that would be one password less to remember.

All blogs will have a link which you can subscribe to. It might be called Atom, or RSS, or simply Syndicate, but they all do the same thing. The reason there are so many names is because there are different standards to create web syndication services. At the moment, it looks like RSS is leading the pack.

If you are not a tech savvy person, just know that the RSS feeds are formatted in a language called XML.  XML is the language behind the formatting the feeds and delivering them to your feed reader. If you have no knowledge of HTML, then you probably don’t need to know much about XML. Just know that the language behind syndication is XML.

As with any other thing, we learn by doing. The same goes for RSS, we learn when we try it.  Try subscribing to a feed or two and check out if RSS is for you.

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