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Free RSS Resources: What is RSS Anyway?
By | March 13, 2008
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary depending on who you listen to. It’s also confused with RDF (Resource Description Framework), XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and a variety of other related TLA’s (Three-Letter Acronyms). RSS is actually a family of web syndication protocols which provide information in XML files known as RSS feeds.
The issue is further confused by some “helpful” RSS feed readers, search engines and directories, which claim that RSS feeds always end with the .rss or .xml extension. NOT! In fact, RSS feeds can have almost any file extension or none at all. The current version of WordPress, a popular and free (free for commercial uses too!) blog software package which I use, uses the .php extension for all of the feeds it generates. I suspect that many other blog packages written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) code also use that extension for their feeds. Feedburner, a great feed re-publishing service, doesn’t use an extension at all, unless you tell it to use a particular one.
If you’re at all familiar with HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code, you’ll be able to read and understand “raw” RSS with no trouble. It’s really just a summary of titles and information about the items you’re publishing in your feed, with HTML-like code wrapped around it so that RSS feed readers and parsers can understand it.
To see the actual raw RSS feed for my Free-RSS-Resources blog on RSS marketing and publishing in your browser, click this link.
The items you publish in your feed can include plain text, HTML, images, links, audio and other types of data files, just like what you can publish on a web page. Think of what an RSS feed sends out as a snapshot of something as small as an email or as big as a web page. Someone viewing your feed with an RSS feed reader will either see summaries of your items along with links to click on in order to see your actual items, or your actual items will be visible immediately in their entirety, depending on how you have your feed set up.
To see how this works, say you have a blog which generates its own RSS feed (WordPress does this automatically from your blog). Every time you post a message on your blog, that same message goes out on the RSS feed to all of your subscribers. If you’re using the default WordPress configuration, the feed contains the title, summary, and various other information about each article you’ve posted. A subscriber will see a pretty version of this information in their RSS feed reader (exactly what they see is dependent on their reader), organized as a list of articles, with the summary description of the currently selected article visible. If they then click on the description, they’ll be able to read the whole article (which is not actually stored in the feed itself – just the links back to your article are stored in the actual feed).
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Brought to you by Free RSS Resources, the web’s most up-to-date collection of RSS feed directories, podcast directories, blog directories, blog pingers and RSS marketing tools. Come learn how to increase your blog and website traffic, and profit by setting up and marketing your own RSS feed. My free 2005 e-book shows how.
Topics: RSS in Business |