What Is RSS?

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Anyone who has visited more than a couple of blogs has probably encountered what is known as an “RSS Feed”. Sometimes webmasters will share their RSS feed using an icon like the above icon. Clicking it will give you some strange text or if the webmaster is using feedburner to track the stats on their blog you will be directed to the feed via feedburner.

RSS has had several meanings in the past one of which is “Rich Site Summary” the other is “Really Simple Syndication”. Most use the second meaning as RSS is a simple means of syndicating content for use across the Internet. In it’s simplest RSS is simply a set of “tags” that contain data such as the URL for the post or page, the title of the post, and the text of the post.

There are several uses of RSS the main one being that a reader of a blog can subscribe to the RSS feed using services such as Google reader. Google reader also makes it handy to share items with other readers by their share icon at the bottom of each post. The share is then available for readers to share posts they find interesting. Just for fun I have went to feedburner and “burned” my favorites feed from google reader. Now folks who have similar interests can subscribe to my shared items and read my shares in google reader of choose e-mail delivery. Programmers familiar with PHP can also use code such as lastRSS to import RSS feeds right into their websites that do not use wordpress.

Wordpress also has several plugins available to import feeds into your themes sidebar. This gives webmasters/bloggers the ability to display items of interest to their readers. One plugin worth trying is the feedlist wordpress plugin. I am using that on several blogs.

RSS has changed the way media works. In the past websites would try to keep all of their information on the site because they were charging for banners on a per impression basis. If they offered RSS and a way to read content that does not involve someone coming to their site the impressions would go down. Luckily companies see the value in offering RSS of their articles instead of trying to fight the rising use of RSS readers. Many of the larger media outlets do not publish the whole story, thus requiring readers to visit their site to get the entire story. Wordpress users can specify how much to post in the admin area under Settings -> Reading -> Full Text or Summary. I choose Full Text.

I have also written a RSS feed generator for osCommerce. The feed will display the products in order that they were added, with the most recent products first. I’ll post an article later with how to use this in case any osCommerce users would like to try the code out.

Please feel free to share if you have any unique uses for your RSS feed or if you found this article helpful.