Most web users will have noticed the orange RSS feed icons that have cropped up on web sites all over the place. Seems almost everyone is now offering a “feed” of their content.
The traditional web site model requires the end user to visit on a regular basis to see if anything has changed. An RSS feed is basically a service to which the user can subscribe in order to be “notified” when there is new or changed content.
A feed is a stream of content in a standardised format. In the case of News/Current Affairs sites this will be news articles. For Blogs or Forums it will be blog or forum articles. For large corporates it may be press releases. Or it may even contain audio or video podcasts.
In order to “read” a feed you’ll need a Feed Reader (sometimes called a Feed Aggregator) – there are squillions of these available which is probably a topic for another blog article, but the latest versions of IE7 and Firefox both have basic feed reading capabilities to get you started.
The really nice thing about RSS feeds is that because it’s a standarised format you can take feeds from totally different sources and view them all in the same place and in a consistent format. Rather than regularly checking half a dozen blogs, forums & web sites you can see and link to all new content in one place.
There are now two main standards – Atom & RSS 2.0. If you’re interested in the nitty gritty have a look at some of these articles. Be warned though some of them won’t be the most exciting read you’ve had!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_%28standard%29#Atom_Compared_to_RSS_2.0
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3223484.stm#whatisrss
http://blog.contentious.com/archives/2003/10/18/what-are-webfeeds-rss-and-why-should-you-care
You’ll hopefully have noticed that I also have an “RSS feed” on this blog so please sign up to my feed!
Filed under: Computers, Technology
[...] by TeacherJay on July 8th, 2007 TeacherJay was going to write a post on this, but Iain Magee has already on a very nice job of explaining this concept for the casual reader. Long gone are the days when checking for new content meant typing in that [...]
This would have been a helpful post to link to when I wrote about RSS on my blog.
[...] PS – Here’s an article from last year with some information on what RSS feeds are! Posted by Iain Magee Filed in Blogging, Computers, Google, Software, Web [...]