What is RSS? – Part 1

This concept is important enough that I have decided to write a post about it, in hopes of educating my readers and improving your internet lifestyle. Let me assure you, this isn’t hard. It just sounds hard.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. I’m going to try to keep my explanation as simple as possible, but there are a few technical terms to get familiar with.

Back in the dark ages of the internet, when I was just a 13 year old learning html and coding my first website by hand, people called webmasters built websites for people and companies. It was complicated and required in depth knowledge and lots of time. So, websites were pretty static. In other words, once it was built, it stayed that way until you were ready to fork over more money to the webmaster.

Fast forward to today. Hardly anyone wants a website that stays the same. With advances in technology came advances in website design. We all want new and changing content every time we visit a website. It’s called a dynamic website. As more people wanted sites and more people wanted to change the content on their site fairly often, new ways of interacting with the website audience were developed.

It has become very easy for even the most basic user to have a blog, website, photo gallery, or some other online presence. The hard parts are already completed for you.

Well, as more and more websites become dynamic, people were no longer able to check on each of their favorite sites every day to check for content. Some sites even change content by the hour. So various ways of detecting content updates were developed. One of those ways is RSS.

You might hear or see something called an RSS feed, or somebody might say they are subscribed to a blog. Here’s how it works:

I have a blog. It’s located on the internet at www.deepdisch.net. If you type that into your web browser you will wind up on my site. However, I don’t even want people to visit my site every day. I want my site to go to them. I want my content to be delivered to them, because lets face it, sometimes people forget to visit deepdisch.net.

So i have another address to my site. feeds.feedburner.com/DeepDisch

If you click that link, you are taken to a site called feedburner, which facilitates the process of subscribing to my blog.

Here’s the real world analogy. You are sitting in the doctors office reading a magazine that you never heard of called Deep Disch. It’s a really fascinating magazine about cool stuff, but before you really get a chance to read the whole magazine, you are called into the office to get your tonsils removed, just as you get up, a subscription card falls to the floor offering a free subscription to Deep Disch. You grab it, stick it in your pocket and are on your way. A few days later, when you are doing laundry, you find that card in the pants pocket and decide to fill it out and recieve your free magazine. So, a moth later you get a new issue of Deep Disch Magazine and every month after that you have excellent free content to read while on the toilet.

OK, so how does a subscription work?
Well, to have a subscription to a magazine you have to have somewhere to receive your mags and also somewhere to read them. The online version is called an AGGREGATOR. It’s similar to an email inbox, except it is specifically designed for these RSS feeds.

But there is a big difference between email and RSS. The idea of email is a ‘push’ process. I send you or push you an email and you recieve it in your email inbox. However, an aggregator checks the ‘RSS feed’ and then ‘pulls’ new content into your RSS inbox. This is good because you can control the content you are getting instead of the other way around.

There are lots of option out there, however the best one is called Google Reader. Wikipedia has a list of available aggregators, some are web-based, some are client based, meaning they are programs you install on your system, and others are built into web browsers or email programs. I’ve tried many different ones and I highly suggest Google Reader for it’s feature set and ease of use. If you want more suggestions leave a comment and I will help out further.

Above is a screenshot of my personal google reader. click here for a larger version.

In that screengrab you can see the list of feeds I’m subscribed to on the left and on the right is the list of posts from one called “Multimedia Shooter“.

To use Google Reader you will need a free google account, something I suggest having anyway.

So I have an aggregator. Now what?
Now you have to subscribe to some blogs or other content. All the major news outlets have RSS feeds, Consumer Reports has RSS feeds, Blogs, magazines, photo hosting sites, they all have RSS feeds. Usually you can find them by looking for this icon:

It is the new standard icon for subscribable data. Anytime you see it, you know there is an RSS feed associated with it. Usually you can click on the icon itself, although sometimes there will be another link as well.

Here is a really long list of RSS feeds just from www.msnbc.com.

Below is a screengrab from cnn.com showing the icon denoting a feed.

This is enough education for one day. I’m going to continue writing on this topic with some more advanced features and ideas in a few days. Please leave a comment if you have questions or have trouble with anything I’ve talked about so far.