First, you have to know what RSS stands for… The very first version of RSS was invented by Guha at Netscape in March 1999. This version is known as RSS 0. 9 and the acronym stands for RDF Site Summary. Later, in July 2003, Winer and UserLand Software introduced RSS 2.0. When we are talking about RSS in 2009, we are talking about the version 2. 0 most commonly expanded as”Really Simple Syndication”. RSS is a really great innovation strategy. It can be a very good tool if you visit some Internet sites that are updated often during the week. By using this new technology you can surf the web more effeciently because instead of going to each web sites one at a time, RSS enables you to receive updated posts or web pages all in one area of what we call a reader. There are many RSS readers available out there… If you want to get a great RSS reader, I personnaly recommend those:
- metaRSS
- Attensa Online
- FeedFeeds
With this technology innovation you can never miss the updates that you’re looking for. You can also install your reader on a mobile device such as a blackberry. This way, you can be updated of new content wherever you go… Here is a short video describing the basics of RSS and it also explain how the readers work for you. Basically, what you need to do: install the RSS reader of your choice and subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds.
How does it works? The source of information is called a feed. When you subscribe to a rss feed, you will receive a series of headlines with a short description of every new articles published on this web page. By looking at those, you can select the articles that grab you interest and enjoy your information without wasting any of your precious time. Some Internet browsers can automatically detect when you can subscribe to a RSS feed on a web page. Opera and Firefox, for example, will display the RSS logo when they find a feed. If you use another software to surf, you have to look for the orange square with a white dot and a little arc that represent the diffusion of the information.
How to create RSS feeds? It not really complicated if you know the basics of html programming. If you have a normal web site, you can add the RSS feature in a flick of a switch. If you are using Drupal or Wordpress to build your web site, there are many widgets available that will automatically integrate the RSS function to your posts. RSS uses RDF as a guide to tell a feed reader how to read the file. RDF means Resource Description Framework. RDF is based on XML. XML is a programming language really similar to HTML. XML stands for extensible markup language and HTML stands for hypertext markup language. HTML is the language used by all the Web Sites. When you start using XML and RDF, it enables you to add new interesting features to your sites. When you install the widget to your web site, it will add the RSS tags into the html code so the feed readers can spot your headlines and the beginning of your articles. This work can also be done manually, but it takes much more work.
Knowing all that now, you should be able to get your information in a new and improved way because of this great modern technology.