The ‘What is…’ Series: RSS
As promised previously, here is the first of my series on “What is…”
Q: What is RSS?
A: In a nutshell, RSS is an XML file format designed to syndicate headlines and other content from web sites, such as major news sites (CNN), news-oriented community sites (Slashdot), and personal blogs. These RSS files, also called feeds or channels, contain a list of items. Each item typically contains a title, content, and a link to the web page where the item came from. These items can also contain the date it was published, the author’s name, and other additional information.
Huh? Say what?
Okay, let’s step back and take a look at an example.
Say you get three newspapers every morning – the New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal. You would like to read all the news before you leave for work, but often find it hard do to so (you hit the snooze a few too many times). You find yourself skimming through sections of the papers, or skipping over parts entirely, so you have time to read the business, technology, or sports pages, things that interest you the most and would be good to know before your work day begins. You don’t really care about the entertainment or lifestyle pages right now. Yet you’re still crunched for time trying to read articles from three different papers. You think to yourself: “If only I could have a stack of articles delivered to me each day, no matter what paper they come from, based on what I find the most interesting, with all the headlines in the same place so I can quickly skim through them…”
Now, apply this to websites and blogs. Say there are 30 websites you check out on a daily basis. Of these, maybe you only have time to check out 15 before you rush off to work. You don’t want to have to be clicking through your bookmarks to find that a site isn’t updated, and sometimes it can be difficult to skim through a website looking for new information/posts, remembering where you left off the night before and having to adjust to the different formats of each website.
This is where RSS comes in. Think of RSS as a way to grab all the new articles, posts, sports headlines, job listings, classifieds, etc. from any number of sites and display them in one central location, in such a way that you can easily skim through only the headlines that you want.
Wow, cool! So all that information from all those websites are in one place just for me. Sweet! So it’s basically like having a custom tailored newspaper?
Yeah, essentially that’s it.
Now, wait, do I only get the headlines, or the actual content as well?
It depends, varying from website to website. Some sites will only display headlines in your “custom newspaper,” while others will have a summary of the article, an excerpt of the article, or even the whole article.
Okay, you got me interested. How do I make my own newspaper then?
The first thing you’ll need to do is find out if the websites you’re interested in offer an RSS feed. A website is said to be “syndicated†when it has an RSS feed. If a site offers a feed, you’ll typically see a link that says RSS, XML, or Atom, or you’ll see one of the following images:
(There are definitely other ways that sites announce they have an RSS feed, so you may have to look around for it.)
Once you determine that a site has a feed, you’ll need an aggregator (aka news reader or feed reader) to read the feeds. This is an article unto itself, though. Simply, an aggregator brings all the feeds together for you. They can be web based, email based, or run from your computer. More on this later, though. (Check out Bloglines if you don’t wanna wait.)
Okay, so, to make my custom newspaper, I need to see if a site has an RSS feed, and get an aggregator. What then?
It’s pretty simple from this point. Basically, you get the website’s RSS feed (available at the RSS link or icon) and subscribe to it with your chosen feed reader. The aggregator does the rest. It automatically checks for new items from websites to which you’re subscribed. Then, when you check your aggregator, you’ll see a list of sites that have been updated, with a list of headlines and/or articles from those sites. Different readers work in different ways, but most will alert you if there are new items, and how many new items there are. More details on the most popular aggregators and their features next time… In the meantime, take a look at my Bloglines blogroll for an example.
Hmm, okay, I think I got it. Doesn’t sound too complicated. But doesn’t this mean that no one will go to the website, if they’re reading the entries in an aggregator.
To some extent, this is true. Aggregators are pretty basic, though. Their job is simply to display the headlines and articles; you won’t actually be seeing the website itself. Therefore, to get the full site experience, to enjoy the design of the website and any additional sections on the website, you’ll have to visit the site. Additionally, if you want to comment on a particular entry, or see the comments posted by others on an entry, you’ll have to visit the website. This is why RSS provides links – so it’s easy to click on an item in an aggregator and go directly to that post on the website where it originated.
I’m still not sure about this. Why would I want to lose traffic by offering an RSS feed? I just won’t offer one and make people come directly to my site.
The choice is yours, but in reality, you may actually be losing traffic without one. According to Technorati, there are currently more than 5 million blogs, and about 12,000 new blogs are created EVERY DAY (that’s one every 7.4 seconds). Every hour sees about 10,800 blog updates. Imagine trying to keep up with all these blogs, as well as non-blog websites, by simply visiting them via bookmarks and such. That’s a lot of time spent navigating the web and reading! Granted, no one wants to, or can, read 5 million blogs, but people do read quite a few. There are some people who keep tabs on more than 1000 blogs a day. Personally, I have about 90 that I check out on a daily basis. The average person reads about 20 a day. I can tell you, from experience, that without RSS, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with all these sites (and these are sites that I enjoy and WANT to keep up with). Having an aggregator streamlines the process by showing me who has posted something new on their site, so I don’t waste time visiting a site that hasn’t been updated, as well as allowing me to group my RSS feeds, so I make sure to visit my friends’ sites first. I check my feeds many times a day, and regularly visit those sites that I want to comment on, or see comments on. However, if a site doesn’t have a feed, I may only visit it once a day, or every other day, depending on how much time I have. Can you see how your site may be losing traffic without a feed? Again, this decision is totally up to you. It’s your site, your choice. And know that faithful readers will still check out your site no matter what.
Okay, you’ve convinced me RSS is a good thing to have on my site. How do I make an RSS feed for my site?
This depends on who your website/blog is through. If you have a Xanga, Blogger, Live Journal, WordPress, or Moveable Type blog (there are others as well, but I can’t mention them all…), you most likely automatically have an RSS, or Atom, feed for your page. Simply find the settings for the feed (possibly under the sections for site feed, syndication, etc) and make sure the feed is turned on. Then, be sure you have a link to the feed somewhere on your page so others can find it (the help pages of your blog program should tell you what the link to your feed is). That’s it! You don’t have to do anything else, other than write good stuff to get people to read your articles. If you’re unlucky enough not to have an RSS feed easily available to you, you can write your own program using the RSS specs (or Atom specs). Note that RSS files do not have a common file extension, but typically they will end in .xml, .rss, or .rdf.
You’ve mentioned Atom a couple of times. What’s that?
Atom is similar to RSS in it’s intent, but has a different format. It’s simply another type of feed. As with all things, there can never be just one format. Many websites will offer both RSS and Atom feeds. More importantly, a good aggregator will support both RSS and Atom, so it doesn’t matter which format a site uses. Right now, RSS is the most popular format.
What does RSS stand for, anyway?
RSS can stand for ‘Really Simple Syndication’, ‘RDF Site Summary’, ‘Rich Site Summary,’ depending on who or what you’re talking about. All basically mean the same thing, but again, it’s based on the format and such. ‘Really Simple Syndication’ is most common, though.
Is RSS new?
Not really, though the recent blog explosion has brought it more into the limelight lately, with major sites such as CNN jumping on the bandwagon that bloggers originally started.
RSS can be traced back to this post on 12/15/1997 by Dave Winer, one of the original bloggers. Netscape started playing around with it some in 1999, for use on it’s web portal – my.netscape.com – but later abandoned it. Read more about the history at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssVersionHistory
Here’s a funny look at the history of RSS and the different versions out there.
Hmm, very interesting stuff. Think I’ll check it out some more
Enjoy!
Next up: Newsreaders/Aggregators
Was this post helpful to you? Too long or short? Too technical? Leave me a comment with your thoughts or additional questions. Also, please Rate This Post. Your feedback will help me with future articles like this.
To those of you who may be reading this that know more about RSS and feeds than I do, please feel free to correct anything that I may have gotten wrong. Thanks!
Sources used for this article include the following:
http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(protocol)
http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html
http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/
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Still remember you emailing me about Car-Part's website.
never flown?! that blows me away! typo in the 'caliper'. 
I’ll be one of those tesimonial people that is paid to say good things about your services. IT was very good though. It seemed kind of long, but it truly was worth it. It gave a ton of useful information that I could understand. And it wasn’t really all that long.I enjoyed reading it; It was like an infomercial or something. Just make everything this understandable and fun….
Yeah, I was one of those unlucky people who doesn’t use a program that automatically makes a feed. I actually didn’t have any idea what RSS was until you suggested I syndicate my blog. But it wasn’t too hard to make a feed.
THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO EXPLAIN THIS CRITICAL PART OF THE BLOGGING WORLD. WITHOUT THIS INFO I DON’T KNOW THAT I WOULD EVER HAVE KNOWN WHAT RSS WAS?
MY BLOG IS INDEBTED TO YOU!
With your explaining, I have opened up an account on bloglines and have added several blogs to it. Just got to get used to reading things on there instead of each blog.