RSS and Atom Feeds
A friend recently commented that there is a lot of great information available in blogs but who has the time to read them? Time is precious and in short supply.
RSS and Atom are designed to address this issue. They allow us to track more information in less time. Since they are extremely similar, we’ll focus on RSS. A “RSS feed” encapsulates what’s new in a blog or website, and an “aggregator” or “feed reader” lets a user easily and quickly check for new content of interest.
RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication,” and RSS is a format for summarizing new web content. A RSS feed will typically have a list of what’s new on a website. Each item has a title, a description, and a link to the website where the item appears. For a blog, the items will be the most recent posts. An item’s “description” might be its first paragraph or even the entire post. For example my blog’s RSS feed contains the title, first paragraph, and a link, for each of my last ten posts.
RSS is used not only by blogs but by traditional websites as well. For example, The New York Times, Reuters, Yahoo, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, The US Department of State and The Washington Post all have RSS feeds. Many sites have multiple feeds, e.g. The New York Times has feeds for arts, automobiles, books, business, etc. which parallel their content. Even some retailer’s websites have RSS feeds that show what new merchandise they have.
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RSS and Atom are designed to address this issue. They allow us to track more information in less time. Since they are extremely similar, we’ll focus on RSS. A “RSS feed” encapsulates what’s new in a blog or website, and an “aggregator” or “feed reader” lets a user easily and quickly check for new content of interest.
RSS stands for “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication,” and RSS is a format for summarizing new web content. A RSS feed will typically have a list of what’s new on a website. Each item has a title, a description, and a link to the website where the item appears. For a blog, the items will be the most recent posts. An item’s “description” might be its first paragraph or even the entire post. For example my blog’s RSS feed contains the title, first paragraph, and a link, for each of my last ten posts.
RSS is used not only by blogs but by traditional websites as well. For example, The New York Times, Reuters, Yahoo, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, The US Department of State and The Washington Post all have RSS feeds. Many sites have multiple feeds, e.g. The New York Times has feeds for arts, automobiles, books, business, etc. which parallel their content. Even some retailer’s websites have RSS feeds that show what new merchandise they have.
Click to Read More
posted by Ted Demopoulos at 4:24 PM
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