RSS Feeds

RSS Feeds

Your portal on RSS Feeds. Really Simple Syndication feeds come standard with most blogging platforms. Learn how RSS works, how to manage the settings of your RSS feed, and the strategic pros and cons of offering full text RSS syndication... [more]

Your portal on RSS Feeds. Really Simple Syndication feeds come standard with most blogging platforms. Learn how RSS works, how to manage the settings of your RSS feed, and the strategic pros and cons of offering full text RSS syndication. RSS uses XML to ship content and data.

RSS formats are specified in XML data formats. RSS delivers data, content, and information as specific XML files. Coombined, these files are called the RSS feed or more genericly the web feed for a blog or news website. Usually the feed includes recent article headlines and often text and photos from the articles.

What is RRS? and How do I use it?

On the top right of the GoSolarPowerForHomes website, you will see a weird orange button. This is your invitation to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you have no idea what RSS and syndication are then don’t worry. Help is at hand. I wrote this just for you!

In truth it wasn’t so long ago that I had no idea what these terms were. I had literally no idea how it all worked. What is syndication of content anyway?

The Basics

In a nutshell, you use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to syndicate or subscribe to the feed of a website, blog or almost any media content online. This applies not just to articles. It can be music, video or almost any digital media.

By syndicating to an RSS feed, you subscribe to the feed of the site, which means you do not have to go visit the website to read the latest content. Instead, you can use feed reading software or a website to read the latest articles. So, ultimately, you can collect all the feeds of all your favorite sites (provided they make them available) all in one place.

So, RSS syndication simply allows you to consume your favorite content in a really efficient way. I am not joking here! For real you can become an expert in any field with ease thru RSS syndication. By selectively choosing appropriate feeds using your RSS feeder you can save a minimum of an hour each day in terms of research time and become the most knowledgeable expert in your field in next to no time!

The best way to learn is by practice and example so I suggest you go subscribe to Google Reader and dive on in there. You can use any gmail account to subscribe with. It is really easy and intuitive. Nevertheless, here’s a great little video from my blog mentors that hopefully will explain everything to you.

 

 

Subscribing to a Blog

At the top of my website, you will see an orange RSS link button. To subscribe to my feed all you do is copy and paste that link into feed reading software or a web based reader like Google Reader. You may also have to name the feed and, not surprisingly, this feed is called “GoSolarPowerForHomes”.

The RSS feed link for my site looks like this - http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoSolarPowerForHomes - and if you click it, you will get the output of this blog sent to your Google Reader the very second I publish it. (How cool is that?!!!)

You may notice that I use a special third party service called FeedBurner. This adds extra features to my feed output and most importantly it provides me with statistics on how many people subscribe to my blog. You don’t need to worry about this. There’s nothing weird or frightening about it. It’s simply for my blog management.

You will find that all blogs have a link that you can subscribe to. It might be called Atom, or RSS, or Syndicate, but they all do the same thing. They’re just different standards to create web syndication services (much like the old BETA vs VHS video format competition). At the moment it appears that RSS is winning the standards war so you’ll mostly see the orange RSS links everywhere.

The Future

RSS is designed to make your life easier. It’s worth your while to become familiar with this new technology simply because you are going to be seeing a lot more of it. If you can keep abreast of the technology wave you will have less frustration when using the Internet and you will be able to squeeze all the juice out of the very latest developments online.

A secret golden rule online goes, “If it’s not really easy, it won’t catch on.” So don’t let ‘technofear’ get in your way. You’ll be glad you stepped thru it soon!

From Sam Deane,
your solar power for homes guide,
at www dot go solar power for homes dot com.

-
Info via: entrepreneurs-journey.com
The Trackback, http://www.gosolarpowerforhomes.com/solar-power-for-homes/what-is-rrs-and-how-do-i-use-it by Sam Deane, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

 

 

                                                              
                                                                 Visit Our Solar Power For Homes

                                                                 All-New Homes & Gardens Solar Store!

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Sponsors
Comments
Be the first to leave a comment!
Add a Comment:
Already a member? Log In
Sponsors
About the Author

10 Kudos
Top Geek Articles
Celebrities on the Phone
Cell phones are to celebrities like bats are to baseball: no one runs too far without them.
Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit.
Gratuitous...
Hot Geeks -- The Sexiest Geeky Girls
These girls are gorgeous AND they'll play Warcraft with you. Doesn't get much better than that.
More From Zimbio
Copyright © 2009 - Zimbio, Inc. Some rights reserved.