What are RSS feeds and what can I do with them?

Question

I don't really understand RSS feeds. They seem like long codes with no meaning. What can I do with them, and how do they work?

Answer 1

Hi Vincent,

Yeah, RSS can be a little confusing but it can prove to be a vital necessity of those who run multiple websites, or just people who tend to check alot of news websites. The RSS feed displays all the latest information posted on a website, without having to go through the whole visting the website and selecting the links you want from the navigation area.

Firefox (an alternative browser to IE) has RSS feeds prebuilt into it and gives external support for other websites such as BBC.co.uk and the likes. You might find this website incredibly useful and it tells you in detail everything that RSS can do for you: http://www.whatisrss.com/

Regards,

WebPod

Answer 2

RSS is a standard format for syndicating content on the Internet. The content can be anything! Often information contained in an RSS feed is syndicated on other sites which expands its reach.

Website visitors love RSS because they choose which feeds they wish to subscribe to, if at any point they are unhapy with the content contained in the RSS feed they simply unsubscribe and no longer receive notification of feed updates.

RSS is really a win, win for both subscribers and publishers.

In order to get a better understanding of how RSS works download an RSS reader or use a web aggregator and subscribe to an RSS feed (they are usually indicated by a small orange icon).

Answer 3

Do you know what XML is?  It's a text file that has code written in a way that programs can know how to read it.  It's easily readable by humans.  Kinda like:

<library>

<book>Harry Potter</book>

<book>The Bible</book>

</library>

An RSS feed is basically an XML file written in a way with specific <tags> that define the content's title, description, etc.  Some programs (RSS Readers) will look at the file and expect those certain <tags> and do something with it.  RSS feeds are commonly used for displaying news (with each article having a title, description, etc), blog entries, website updates, etc.  People like to have a reader that collects all the feeds and have it be a one stop shopping for viewing what they like to see at once, almost like subscribing to newsletters and having it be sent to your email (looking at the newsletters to see what's new without visiting each and every website to see what's new).