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Saturday, August 8, 2009

What is RSS?


RSS logo

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication". Many people describe it as a "news feed" that you subscribe to. It is a technology that is being used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites.

Earlier days we had to "bookmark" websites in our browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added and updated.

Following are some problems or lack of performance in bookmarking. But still we bookmark web sites since we are not used to RSS yet.


  • The web surfer had to do all the work, visit the site and check for updates.
  • More complicated when you are trying to track many websites at once
  • If you forgot to check your bookmarks, you would miss the updates.
  • On the other hand, your visits to the web sites that don't update very often are in vain.

Nowadays people are so busy, Cannot afford much time on checking updates and all. So this led people to think of a way to bring the updates from the sites to them rather than checking the sites manually. This is what RSS does for us.

RSS is a technology that provides you with a method of getting updates sent to you for you to read at leisure. It saves your time and helps you to get the information you want. I just started with feeding and it seems quite easy. But still I couldn't give up bookmarking either. Read further and get familiar with RSS today.

How to use RSS?

You need a RSS Feed Reader. RSS Reader is, to which you get the updates fromthe websites you subscribed so that you can read them. There are many feed readers, you can start with Google Reader and Bloglines. Both are free and easy to use and work a little like email. The best way to learn how to use either Google Reader or Bloglines is, simply subscribe to some feeds and give it a go. Check the dropdown list on the right menu for more readers.

There are two places to look for a site's feed:

1. On the Site
2. In Your Browser

On Site Subscription

You may have noticed a lot of little buttons and widgets appearing on web sites and blogs. Little orange buttons, links called RSS, XML, ATOM and many more.

They come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few you might have seen:

common RSS feeds
There are plenty more and any of these buttons or anything like them it means that the site you are viewing almost certainly has a feed that you can subscribe to.

Browser Subscription

Many internet browsers now have the ability to find and subscribe to RSS feeds built right into them. When you visit a site and if you see an orange icon in the right hand side of address bar it means that website has an RSS feed.

This is how it looks when you visit http://wickeys.blogspot.com using Firefox:

RSS icon in address bar

By clicking the orange icon that you see in the address bar you can easily subscribe to get updates from wickeys blog.

Once you have subscribed to a few feeds you will begin to see unread items in your Feed Reader and you can start reading.

Check this video out for more information:




2 comments:

  1. Is google reader a kind of RSS ?? im used to google reader and i prefer it much

    ReplyDelete
  2. You can just try that out mr.Eagle-eye. You just try to subscribe to wickeys posts. The first on the dropdown is "Add to Google". Click on that and you will be refered to a page where you will get option and one is google reader.

    ReplyDelete