What is RSS and how do I use it?
July 1, 2008
Here at Purecontent.com we thought it might be useful to our website users if we explained in some detail about RSS feeds - what they are and how they can work to your advantage. Our own RSS news feed has been found to be invaluable by many of our regular website visitors. It provides bang up to date information in a very convenient format straight onto your desktop. Why not read the information below and gain a working knowledge of what RSS feeds are and how they work.
RSS can be defined as a group of standardized formats for Web feeds that are used to publish content that has to be regularly updated. This includes podcasts, news items and blog content. These RSS documents are usually referred to as a “feed” or a “web feed.” Normally, an RSS feed will contain either a summary of an item from an associated website or the entire text. There are two ways in which RSS enables a person to stay informed about a particular website’s content from an automated source:
- the information is piped into a special program
- the information is piped in through a filtered display
The main benefit of an RSS feed as a user is that you can accumulate information from multiple websites and aggregate them all into one location. Desktop or web-based software called an “RSS reader” needs to be utilized in order to read the RSS content. The user can specify what categories of information he/she wishes to receive from the various sites that have feeds. For example if you are particularly interested in the latest news from the ‘car hire’ industry then by entering that detail you will receive relative accumulated news items from several sources on a daily basis. There are several sites that provide free downloads of RSS feed readers if the site that you wish to subscribe to does not do so. Most sites that provide an RSS feed will also show a link that will allow you to download the reader software.
The term RSS refers to the following three formats:
- RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90)
- Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
- Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
RSS has great benefits, especially if you have an online business yourself or are a customer needing constant updates from a website. It is a very useful resource for any website to offer to users who simply have to subscribe (usually free of charge) to use it. Customers/readers can be delivered new content literally every day if necessary. Because RSS contains a feature that allows the reader to choose (opt-in) the type of feed that they want to read, it functions in a similar way as does an auto-responder.
If you need to provide/receive news content on a minute-by-minute basis as well as wanting to regularly update your own site with current information, RSS feeds are definitely the easiest and most efficient way to achieve those goals.
This may all sound rather complicated but it is a simple enough system to use once set up. So why not subscribe to our feed today and start to benefit from being up to the minute with all the latest news from www.purecontent.com.
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