If you are a faithful blogs visitor, you probably have seen this three letter acronym in your Internet surfing occasion, the RSS. You might often find RSS buttons or “RSS Feed” text or perhaps “Feed Me” buttons in websites, especially blogs. For those of you who are new-comers for blogs, you might wonder: “What is RSS?”
What is RSS?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; republishing an article that comes from another source, in this case, a website. RSS is a way to get news headlines, podcasts, blog entries, announcements, and any other information automatically updated right on your desktop, so you can avoid going from website to website for the latest news or constantly checking a favorite page for updates.
This one is how Wikipedia has explained about RSS:
RSS (formally “RDF Site Summary”, known colloquially as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.
A RSS feed contains the publicized updates about websites. It may only be a summary or even full articles, with photos or without photos of the latest posting. Those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so they can decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source.
How does RSS works?
“So how does RSS works?” you might ask. There are two main things you will need: an RSS Feed that comes from an RSS-supported website, and a program to read RSS feeds.
A software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator” can be used to read RSS contents. There are many RSS readers out there, some of them are accessed using a browser, and some others are downloadable applications, and every RSS user has their preference. Browser-based news readers let you catch up with your RSS feed subscriptions from any computer. Downloadable applications let you store them on your main computer.
An aggregator reads the RSS feed from the source website, it scans and collects data on the latest RSS feeds, then brings up text headlines and a summary, and you must click a link to see the whole story or go to the updated page. Some stand alone programs, some email clients like Opera Mail and Thunderbird have their own built in RSS reader that collects feeds just like it gathers email. The email clients give the headline then shows the actual page in their preview pane.
The user can subscribe to RSS feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader, or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader later can check the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.
Some websites also provide a link to direct the visitor to the subscription page to their feeds, usually you can find an orange box that says “XML” or “RSS” in those websites. Or they might have any text saying “Feed Me”, or “Syndicate” which will be clickable to bring you to their RSS Feeds.
RSS Formats
RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. And according to Wikipedia, the initials “RSS” are used to refer to the following formats:
- Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
- RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)
- Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
Need more information about RSS? You can find it at Wikipedia. Hope it helps.
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