RSS for Granny

There are a lot of different people who read my website, and in adding e-mail subscriptions to zamwi, I have realized that there lots of people who subscribe through e-mail, probably because they do not know about RSS. So I have decided to go back to the basics and tell anyone how to use RSS.

RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is used by (among other things) news Web sites, weblogs and podcasting. The abbreviation is variously used to refer to the following standards:

Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)- Wikipedia

Allow me to explain…

You may have come across a website with that nifty logo over it, it is usually orange, or a title that says RSS. You might not really care about this, mabe you don’t know what it is, but it makes life so much easier if you do some reading on the web.

Think of RSS as sort of a paper-boy like tool, it goes out and gets new articles, posts, pictures, anything that gets updated on a particular site. For example, my blog has an RSS feed for my new posts, while others allow you to subscribe to comment feeds. News sites use RSS to inform readers about new articles, flickr has RSS for new pictures, Digg uses RSS for virtually everything (front page stories, a user’s stories, a topic’s stories, etc.)

How do I use it though?

Using RSS is simple, but because of lack of support in browsers many are intimidated by RSS initually. To subscribe to a feed you need to have a feed reader. If you are just getting into RSS I think that Firefox’s built in RSS reader would be great for a couple subscriptions, I used to use it, but then moved to NetNewsWire.

To subscribe using Firefox simply drag the RSS logo to the toolbar section in Firefox. You will see the name of the website you are subscribing to on the toolbar in Firefox. Simply click the name and updates show up in a drop down box, now you are using RSS.

Aggregators

Firefox has, what is called, a built in aggregator in the browser, allowing you to subscribe to RSS feeds, however there are programs designed, usually for heavy RSS addicts, that maintain RSS feeds. On the Mac side I use NetNewsWire Lite, the free version of NetNewsWire, to maintain my feeds. It works the same as Firefox’s built in aggregator. I can drag the RSS page into my aggregator, or if I know the URL to the page I can add that by hitting the subscribe button. Aggregators are great ways of fetching and organizing many RSS feeds, and help get your news organized and read in one program.

What is this?

Often times when you click on an RSS link you will get nothing but a page of code. Basically that is because the browser that you are using does not have to capabilities to display the RSS entries. However Feedburner feeds are always displayed due to the built in feed reader on their website, millions of sites feeds are burned by Feedburner.

Point you in the right direction

In closing I would highly recommend, if you do not already, to download Firefox (as there are countless reasons why) and use its built in aggregator to start fetching your news. If you have Firefox and are not interested in what they have, start looking around for aggregators, I recommend NetNewsWire, if you are a Mac user, but using RSS will change the way you receive and read your news for the better.