What Is RSS?

May 21st, 2008 by admin

It seems many people are still uncertain of exactly what RSS is, so I thought I’d do my best to try and explain it.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a technology that allows content to be syndicated - that is to legally appear elsewhere on the Internet.

Let’s look at an example.

This blog has an RSS feed, which is linked to in the navigation menu.

Another website or blog can take this RSS feed and add it to their web page.

In doing this, the articles from this blog would appear on their website.

As an example this can be useful for grabbing related news stories from the BBC or CNN websites and putting them on your website. A dog website can thus have the latest news stories related to dogs showing. A useful service for their visitors.

RSS is also free, so they wouldn’t pay to put those news stories on their website, and the BBC wouldn’t pay to have them featured on the dog site.

But there’s something else here. RSS is dynamic. When CNN updates their news with a new dog news story, the websites displaying that RSS feed would also automatically update with the latest news.

Now of course these days we can have RSS feed readers on our own computers or cell phones. You find a website or blog that you like that has an RSS feed, and type that RSS feed address into your RSS reader software.

Now whenever that website or blog adds new content, it will appear in your RSS software without you actually having to go to the website regularly to see if they’ve updated it.

It makes it easy to stay up to date with all your favorite sites and all the latest topics, news and information that matters to you personally, from one place.

That’s right - using your own RSS feed reader is like having your own personalised newspaper or magazine delivered to your computer every day. Nice, eh?

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