What is RSS?
Posted December 18th, 2007 in Glossary
RSS is an abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication and is commonly known as an "RSS Feed", a "Web Feed" or just simply a "Feed". But what is it? An RSS feed allows a website or blog to be able to publish articles or news in another format, that can be read by a special RSS reader. This allows people to keep up to date with their favourite websites without having to visit each one manually every day (or several times a day as the case may be) because they view all these RSS feeds in one location.
Feed readers
There are a variety of feed readers available, and these are also called "News Aggregators" or just "Aggregators". Some run on your desktop computer on Windows, Mac OS/X or Linux, and others run in your web browser on a 3rd party website which collects updated posts for you.
Some examples of desktop computer feed readers are Akregator for KDE/Linux, FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Omea. A number of email clients have RSS feed reading capabilities, such as Apple Mail for Mac OS/X, Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Opera M2. Some web browsers also contain the ability to automatically fetch updated RSS feeds, such as Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7. And finally there are a number of web based readers such as Bloglines, Google Reader, NewsGator and My Yahoo!
A list of RSS Feed Aggregators can be found at Wikipedia, and also at allrss.com listed as RSS readers by platform (ie Windows, Mac, Linux, Blackberry etc), and a comprehensive list of web based RSS readers.
How to subscribe to a feed?
Modern web browsers are likely to have built in feed reading capabilities, or plug-ins to allow an external feed reader to subscribe to the feed. Examples of this are Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 with built in capabilities, and KDE's Konqueror which has the ability to save the feed to Akregator. I'll look at some of these in depth in future posts.
Generally you know if there's a feed available for a particular website or blog because you'll see the RSS icon somewhere in your browser, often in the address bar. It usually looks like the icon to the left of this paragraph, although usually somewhat smaller.
A lot of websites also have the icon as a button somewhere in the navigation, sometimes choosing to have extremely large feed icons.
Subscribe!
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