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So What IS A RSS (Really Simple Syndication )


RSS is the short form of the term "Really Simple Syndication". It is the technology that publish blog entries, videos, pictures, podcasts and news headlines frequently in a standardized format to users who subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds.

As you can see in most blogs, bloggers use the orange button to allow readers to subscribe to his or her blog's RSS feeds.




History of RSS

In the last decade when RSS began, the popularity of Internet users using RSS was very low. The first version of RSS known as RSS 0.9 was released by Guha at Netscape in 1999.

Version 1.0 was released in 2000 by a project called RSS-DEV Working Group reintroduced support for RDF (Resource Desciption Framework) and added XML namespaces support, adopting elements from standard metadata vocabularies such as Dublin Core.

In 2002, the newest and curre
nt version of RSS came to live as RSS 2.0. The term "Rich Site Summary" was then changed to "Really Simple Syndication". Few years later, Firefox browser started using the orange Feed icon as the universal button for RSS.


Why Use RSS?


Millions of Internet users subscribed to RSS to receive updates from the sites. They use RSS instead of bookmarkting th
e site because they are interested in reading articles such as TechCrunch and Labnol whose content schedule is unpredicable. Of course, if you were to check a particular website for new information many times a day, it will be tedious.

Also, checking many websites at once will bring you confusion and it is a waste of time and effort. Imaging you were to bookmark 10 sites and check for updates every single hour! Therefore, RSS is indeed very useful and important in building our Web experience.


Viewing RSS















RSS feeds can be viewed with a software known as "RSS readers" or sometimes "RSS aggregators". You need these readers in order to view your favourite sites' updates via RSS.

RSS readers come in both Web-based and Desktop-based. Common Web-based RSS readers are Google Reader and BlogLines with other options such as My Yahoo, My AOL and many more. Desktop-based readers include Newsgator, FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.

After subscribing to a site's RSS feeds, your RSS reader will notify you whenever the site updates its posts. The items listed in your reader are ranked from the newest to the oldest. The updates come with a post title, a short description of what the article is about.

If you are interested in the article, simply click on the link and you are done.

Using the E-mail Option Instead

Besides using RSS readers, you can try the e-mail subscription option instead. However, this got to depend on whether the site offers this option. The e-mail subscription option works exactly the same as RSS readers, just that it sends e-mail notifications to you.

Such application that support this service is Feedburner.


Subscribe to My Feed Now


After explaining so much about "What is RSS?", I hope you guys have a better understanding about it.

If you like my blog and love what I write, do Subscribe to my RSS Feeds  for more tech and blogging tips.




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