What is RSS and what can you do with it?
There are a number of ways you can subscribe to, or get automatic updates from any site. Mostly people use our RSS feed.
What is it, and what can it do for you, as a reader or as a blogger?
1. What is RSS?
RSS or “Really Simple Syndication” is a technology used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites. RSS is best described as a “news feed” one subscribes to. These days it is rare to find a website not offering RSS feeds.
In the “old days”, the only way to keep track of updates on a website, was to visit the site regularly. You had to “bookmark” your favourite websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added.
The problem with bookmarking is that it can get cumbersome when you are trying to track many websites at once, you might miss information when you don’t check regularly and you do a lot of work in vain as the site might not have any new posts when you check it.
2. And then there was RSS
What if you could ask a website to let you know of any update? This is what RSS does for you: RSS gets you the most up to date information so you can read it in your own time. It saves time and helps you get the information you want quickly after it was published.
It’s like subscribing to a magazine delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published, it is delivered to your “RSS Reader” every time your favorite website publishes updates.
3. How to Use RSS – Step 1: Get an RSS Reader
The first thing you’ll want to do if you’re getting into “reading sites via RSS” is to hook yourself up with an RSS Feed Reader.
There are many feed readers available. A couple are free, and are web based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines.
Both of these feed readers work a little like your email programme: As you subscribe to feeds you’ll see that unread entries from the sites you’re tracking will be marked. As you click on them you’ll see the latest updates which you can read right there in the feed reader. You are given the option to click through to the actual site or move onto the next unread RSS item – marking the last one as “read”.
If you are more adventurous, you can also use more customizable readers like MyYahoo, MyGoogle, MyMSN, Netvibes or Pageflakes.
4. How to Use RSS – Step 2: Find the RSS feed on your favourite sites
There are two places to look for a site’s feed: on the website and in your browser.
For On-Site subscription, you need to look for some of the small buttons and widgets published on your favorite sites and blogs. Little orange buttons, “counters” with how many “readers a blog has”, links or icons called “RSS”, “XML”, “ATOM” and many more. They come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few you might have seen:
In most cases it’s as simple as either copying and pasting the link associated with the button into your RSS Reader or clicking the button and following the instructions to subscribe using the feed reader of your choice.
On my other site, The Road to the Horizon, I stored the most popular RSS newsfeed subscriptions all on one page.
But nowadays most browsers make it easy for you to subscribe. When you surf a site, you can see if it has an RSS feed by looking in the right hand side of your browser’s address bar (where you type in the site’s URL).
You see the RSS icon? To quickly and easily subscribe to a site, simply click on these icons to see the feed.
5. Don’t want to use an RSS Reader? Try updates via Email!
If the above explanation all just seems a little too complicated, or if you want to read your site’s updates offline, subscribe to RSS feeds via Email.
Here is a sample of an Email update for BlogTips.
6. RSS In Plain English
A video summarizing this post, from the famous series “In Plain English”:
7. If you are a blogger, what can RSS do for you?
Apart from allowing your readers to keep more easily up to date with your latest posts, you can also re-use feeds from other sites.
Integrating the latest headlines from related blogs, or relevant news sources, does spice up your blog.
On my other sites like The Other World News, AidNews or NewsFeeds, I use RSS feeds extensively to aggregate (or summarize) the newest posts from interesting sites. In this post, I explain the technical background of how I manipulate and tweak feeds before I import them into a blog.
This post was inspired by ProBlogger, an endless resource for the serious blogger.
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Peter. Flemish, European, aid worker, blogger, expeditioner, sailor, traveller, husband, father, friend, nutcase. Not necessarily in that order. (
Thanks for the tip. Seeing the small numbers in Google analytics, i was thinking about removing the retweet button.
BTW, considering the enormous amount of you follow i follow crowd in the twitter, would people care to click those links
I don’t know if your retweet button shortens the URL with bit.ly, but -as described in this post- that could give you a black and white figure on the traffic the tweets give.
I do, on my links and have been astonished by the amount of traffic each tweet gives.
It is true there is a “scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours” mentality in the following in Twitter, but not so much in retweeting. At least not in the social community I have created around each of my Twitter accounts.
And maybe that is key in all of it: ensure the quality of your followers. Maybe one tip: I *never* autofollow. This means that “my” social community would never follow me, simply because I would follow back.
I’d like to say they follow my tweets, because they like the content
Hope that helps a bit,
Peter
I have just discovered your site via ICT-KM, and it will keep me busy for hours…. I have been blogging for a few months now, we are one of the NGOs who want to use social media more and are still finding out how best to do that (ILEIA, see http://www.leisa.info). So your site is full of useful stuff (so far I’d only found social media for marketing your business).. thanks and keep up the good work!
Karen
While these sites may be free for us, the end user, google and yahoo take the numbers we provide for them, and they scan the content we enter on their services, and use it as fodder to sell their profitable products, such as adwords.
It is in their interest to keep these sites working well, as the critical mass we provide is the very product they can leverage to advertisers.
That being said, Michael Keizer is correct- if the service is mission critical, buy the pro account, and get on the line with their support if needed.
Do you know of an alternative to Pipes?
@Hank:
Don’t think there is any pro-account formula for Yahoo Pipes unfortunately. The only alternative I found is http://pipes.deri.org/ but looks even more of a hackers tool, and I don’t know how well it performs.
I think I will make my own…
Peter.
i just love to Twitter everyday with my friends. Twitter is much better than blogging in my opinion and it is very addictive too.
. ..
thank you for this good information
nice post . Very helpful information. Thank you.
Hi, this blog post is very well-written and appears extremely useful. But I was just wondering if you could clear something up? You mention Newsgator as a product, but the link to their website shows Newsgator is a company with a lot of products – it isn’t clear which tool or product you used to amalgamate feeds and produce script. Could you explain this step in some more detail?
If you post here please email me to let me know
Many thanks
Jez
Hi Jez,
You are totally correct. Newsgator changed their services end August. The online aggregator functions they used to have is no longer available.
If you are looking for a feed aggregator or RSS-to-script function, have a look at this post:
http://www.blogtips.org/free-rss-tools/
best,
Peter
i think the problem is solved now..
Yahoo Pipes went back up after almost 3 weeks of intermittent problems. There are still problems saving new or modified Pipes, though. That problem exists since at least 2 months….
Peter, thank you for including us in your review. I am happy you like the Dlvr.it service. Stay tuned. LOTS of good things coming. Including many more outputs – Facebook coming very soon.
Also, thanks for the feedback on the stats. In order to “provide interesting statistics,” mash the data and provide some real intelligence we use the Dlvr.it short URL. It makes the data consistent and allows us to do some interesting analysis – lots of things going on in the lab now.
Stay tuned…
Best,
Bill Flitter
Founder, dlvr.it
comprehensive post! Another tools for RSS to twitter is hootsuite, I havent tried it out.. but it gives the feature.
I just discovered Hootsuite’s RSS-to-Twitter function. Will try it out, and update the post.
Thanks for the reminder.
Peter
I agree I think social media is really more important for better communicating with your supporters and building a strong foundation and network of people interested in your cause.
These tips are great. Thanks for sharing.
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