Beginner's Guide To RSS

Find out how RSS can deliver content directly to your desktop.

April 11th, 2006 at 5:12am — Comments: (0) — By: Jonathan Danylko — Tags: RSS

Most everyone in the technology industry has heard about RSS feeds, but according to a recent survey, the general public seems to be having a little bit of trouble understanding what RSS is and how to use it. This post is dedicated to those individuals who want to know a little bit more about what RSS has to offer.

What is RSS?

According to the Wiki, RSS is defined as follows:

RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by news websites, weblogs, and podcasting. The abbreviation is variously used to refer to the following standards:

• Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
• RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9-1.0)
• Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

I know some of you are thinking, "feed format for what?" Look at it this way: It's another way of distributing news to users in a lightweight text file.

Here's a real world example. Let's say that you don't have anything to do (Hey, it could happen) and you turn on the TV and wanted to find out what was happening in the world. So you change the channel to CNN and start watching the news ticker tape at the bottom to find out what’s going on.

RSS feeds work exactly the same way. The only difference is that EVERY channel (translation: web sites) has a news ticker tape running along the bottom of the screen. Now, you really don’t see a ticker tape running along the bottom, but most web sites have them and they are constantly being updated behind the scenes.

Whatever your favorite web site is, chances are, they have an RSS feed. If they don't, they probably don't have any news worth reading about. :-) 

Spotting an RSS feed

Every web site I've visited lately has an RSS/XML feed icon at the bottom of their site or on the bottom of a left or right column. The feed icon could look like this , this , or this . Funny, though, how most of the RSS indicators are at the bottom of web pages and that coincides with the news ticker tapes on the bottom of news channels. Ehh...I digress.

Don't be alarmed if you click on an RSS link and you receive this in your browser:

Figure 1 - A raw RSS/XML Feed

This is the XML file that is transferred to you when you request the RSS feed. I will discuss below how to interpret this into a readable format.

Another note: If you can't find your web site's RSS feed, one place I would recommend looking is Syndic8.com. Syndic8.com is a web site that contains a big...no, not big, HUMONGUS list of RSS feeds on the Internet. If you can't find an RSS feed pertaining to your particular hobby or industry using this RSS feed search engine, I would be amazed.

Managing your RSS feeds

You've visited your favorite AJAX, cooking, or woodworking web site and everything in between and you notice that you are accumulating a LOT of RSS feeds. How do I manage all of them? That’s where the software (or a web application) comes into play.

Using RSS

Obviously, it would take too much time to read such a format and as soon as people see the XML feed on their screen, they freak ("yuck, this RSS stuff is ugly and for the birds"), and they stop right there ("ehhh...it's not worth it.")

You definitely need software to control these animals. The category that these software tools fall into is called Feed Readers.

When you run the feed reader, it will ask you to start typing in all of your RSS Feeds (or URLs) to help locate it on the Internet. When thats finished, the feed reader will go out to the Internet when you tell it, and read each feed in your list, pull back the abstracts, and display the heading and description in a list, grid, or even a newspaper format for you to read. Its kind of like a personalized newspaper delivered to your door every morning.

You are only pulling back headings and a short description of the article. If you want to read the entire article, you need to click on the link. This link will send you to the full article on the web site for further investigation.

Online or Offline Reader?

Now, do you use an online or offline reader? Well, if you travel a lot and have access to the Internet, definitely look at the online readers (discussed below). If you have a stationary place where you work and rarely move from your perch, look into an offline reader (also, discussed below).

For those who still have dial-up, an offline reader is your best bet. The application will log you onto the Internet, retrieve what it needs, and immediately log you off. Then, you can read through your articles.

What happens when you do both? Work from home and travel.

Newspaper on wheels

When you accumulate a large number of feeds, depending on your software, you can generate an OPML file. An OPML file is an XML file format for outlining and it applies perfectly to a list of RSS feeds. If you are on the move, you may want to export your RSS feeds as an OPML text file and then take that file and import it into your other feed reader.

Here are some readers that are out on the market right now.

• FeedDemon (30-day trial, $29.95)
• Google Reader (Free!)
• NewsGator (Free!)
• FeedLounge ($5/month)

These are the top readers in my opinion, but if you want to do more research on feed readers, check out here and here.

My personal feed readers are FeedDemon (home) and Google Reader (away/on the road). Both are awesome tools and I would recommend both to beginners and advanced users for experimenting with RSS feeds.

If anyone has any questions about Feed Readers or RSS feeds, drop a line below in the Chatterbox.