You are here: Home + News > RSS Explained
RSS explained
If you haven't already seen them, you soon will: text links or clickable buttons saying things like "subscribe", "rss", "xml" or "atom". What begun on only a handful of experimental news based sites is steadily becoming mainstream technology.
The actual purpose of these links is to alert you to the fact that a syndication feed is available. Just like printed media, weblogs and other news-based websites share their stories or most recent content with other authors and networks - online syndication is a very effective way of letting your readers know there is fresh content to be found on your site.
So what exactly are we supposed to do with these links? And why bother?
Actually, the buttons/text links themselves only serve a purpose in that they are a visual indicator of feed availability. What we really need is the hyperlink they referance. Hover your mouse (or tab) over the graphic or link and right click, "view properties" and then look at the link address. Look for a url that ends with .rdf, .xml or in this case, wp-rss2.php - that's your feed link.
Now, if you were to click on one of these feed buttons all that will usually happen is that you're sent to a meaningless garble of XML - a structured computer language that won't mean much to you at all unless you happen to be a web programmer. If you're curious, go ahead and click, but be ready to hit the 'back' button.
As a site owner, all you have to do is display your syndication link/(s) somewhere prominent for users to find. As a user, the proper way to view a syndication feed is to use a news reader, otherwise known as an rss aggregator.
There are many to choose from, including Bloglines [Free], FeedDemon [$29.95] and NetNewsWire [$39.95 Mac OS-X]. These software applications reside either on your desktop or integrate with your browser and allow you to subscribe to any number of feeds from a variety of different websites.
The great thing about news readers is that for those of us who read A LOT of blogs/websites we can get caught up with all the new content very quickly, without all the fuss of waiting for images and other elements to load. This is because news readers are mostly text-based - the images and other design elements have been stripped out leaving only the raw text - it's like being able to scan a multitude of headlines from different newspapers before selecting which ones to read in more depth.
Of course, this makes it a lot easier for users to view your website in small browsers such as mobile phones or internet capable PDA's, whilst increasing accessibility for those using text-only browsers like Lynx or JAWS. Allowing your audience to choose their own medium can only be a good thing.
Without trying it out for yourself it's difficult for me to explain this much futher. Go download one of the newsreaders mentioned above [bloglines is the simplest and it's free] and give it a whirl.
Jim, webmaster @ toledoinjurylawyer.com
