What is RSS anyway?
Wed, Jun 29 2005
Recently my company has been receiving almost daily queries from clients asking what the little "RSS" links on some websites are all about. RSS has been around for years but it's only with the recent blog explosion that it has really taken off, so a lot of people are a bit stumped when they come across it and wonder what it means.
So, time for a little lesson in RSS 101!
Many websites now include little buttons or links with labels like "RSS", "Atom", "XML", or "Syndication". These aren't links to other web pages: instead they are links to special files which are designed to be loaded in a piece of software call a "news reader" or "feed aggregator".
You can think if it as being similar to an email link on a webpage: your web browser doesn't understand how to send an email, so if you click an email link on a page your browser opens your email software and gives it the email address. In a similar way, an RSS link is not meant to be used by your browser directly: it's intended to be passed to a feed aggregator program.
However, many computers currently do not yet have feed aggregator software installed so when you click the link your browser probably won't know what to do with it and will just display an error message instead.
But what is RSS anyway?
Websites often publish lists of news headlines and other stories that are updated fairly frequently. The problem is you don't know when they're updated, so you have to keep going back to the site to see if anything new has been added. And if you regularly visit a number of sites that can be a real pain.
RSS and Atom feeds are designed to solve that problem. They allow you to run a piece of software on your computer that regularly checks your favourite websites automatically to see if they have published anything new, and if they have it displays them to you on your local computer without you even having to open a web browser. The software also keeps track of which stories you've seen already so you can choose to only be shown stories you haven't seen yet.
To read RSS or Atom feeds you first need to install feed aggregrator software on your computer. There are a huge number of feed aggregators available free on the Internet for Windows, MacOS and Linux, so getting the software isn't the problem: it's choosing which software to get! For Windows a good starting point is the Top 10 feed reader list at http://email.about.com/cs/rssfeedreaders/tp/top_rss_windows.htm, which provides information about where to download them.
Once you've installed a feed aggregator you will need to add feeds for your favourite sites. Check the documentation for your software for the specifics, but the basic concept will be using an "add feed" option into which you paste the URL of an RSS or Atom feed. This is where the RSS and Atom buttons on websites come into it: if you want to add that site to your list of feeds, just click the button and copy the URL, then paste it into your feed aggregator. For example, the URL for the IVT news feed looks like this:
http://www.ivt.com.au/sb/modules/latestnews/feeds/rss2.xml
If you paste that URL into your feed aggregator you'll be notified each time a news item is added to the IVT site. Once you've added some feeds your aggregator will regularly check them for updates, and notify you of any new stories you haven't seen yet.