What Is: RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds let you gather headlines from various websites in one place-an RSS reader, which may be web-based, integrated with your e-mail program, or a stand-alone program.

From your RSS reader, you can monitor information from several websites without having to individually visit each site.

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

RSS-aware programs called news aggregators are popular in the weblogging community. Many weblogs make content available in RSS. A news aggregator can help you keep up with all your favorite weblogs by checking their RSS feeds and displaying new items from each of them.

A brief history

But coders beware. The name "RSS" is an umbrella term for a format that spans several different versions of at least two different (but parallel) formats. The original RSS, version 0.90, was designed by Netscape as a format for building portals of headlines to mainstream news sites. It was deemed overly complex for its goals; a simpler version, 0.91, was proposed and subsequently dropped when Netscape lost interest in the portal-making business. But 0.91 was picked up by another vendor, UserLand Software, which intended to use it as the basis of its weblogging products and other web-based writing software.

In the meantime, a third, non-commercial group split off and designed a new format based on what they perceived as the original guiding principles of RSS 0.90 (before it got simplified into 0.91). This format, which is based on RDF, is called RSS 1.0. But UserLand was not involved in
designing this new format, and, as an advocate of simplifying 0.90, it was not happy when RSS 1.0 was announced. Instead of accepting RSS 1.0, UserLand continued to evolve the 0.9x branch, through versions 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, and finally 2.0.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html

Defined in XML, the Rich Site Summary (RSS) format (aka "Really Simple Syndication"), previously known as the RDF Site Summary, has quietly become a dominant format for distributing news headlines on the Web. WebRef maintains its own RSS feeds, including our our front page, and JavaScript Tip of the Day. Here are some top resources for more info on RSS.

WebReference Articles

http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a system whereby a web site, like this one, can create a newsfeed of the articles on the site. This newsfeed is like a constantly updating list of the latest articles. If you monitor the newsfeed, you can have copies of the articles available to you without having to visit the original website.

People can monitor an RSS newsfeed. So can other websites. It's not the same as subscribing, because you never register with the provider, as you would with a mailing list. You stay anonymous. If you monitor the RSS newsfeed, then you will see updates automatically. For websites that subscribe, the website can show our latest headlines automatically.

Because it is newer technology, not all websites have RSS newsfeeds, but you will start to see more and more of them. For example, the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN all make their articles available via newsfeed. Now S.H.A.N. does too on shanland.org.

How do I start using RSS feeds?

from BBC News:

"In general, the first thing you need is something called a News Reader. There are many different versions, some of which are accessed using a browser, and some of which are downloadable applications. All allow you to display and subscribe to the RSS feeds you want.

Once you have chosen a News Reader, all you have to do is to decide what content you want. For example, if you would like the latest BBC News Entertainment stories, simply visit the Entertainment section and you will notice an orange RSS button on the left hand side.

If you click on the button you can subscribe to the feed in various ways, including by dragging the URL of the RSS feed into your News Reader or by cutting and pasting the same URL into a new feed in your News Reader.

Some browsers, including Firefox and Opera, have functionality which automatically picks up RSS feeds for you. For more details on these, please check their websites."

http://www.rssgeneral.com/


Publisher's Guide to RSS
Distribute Your Content on Yahoo!

Feed the World

Would you like a free and easy way to help your site reach new readers? Or let current readers know when your site's been updated? Sounds like it's feeding time. A "feed" is what everyone from bloggers to big-league website publishers use to syndicate a summary of their latest content. Syndicated content comes in many shapes and sizes: headlines, photos, video, podcasts, sports scores, stock prices, weather -- almost anything that gets updated regularly. Users subscribe to feeds via news aggregators such as My Yahoo!, which gather the user-selected feeds and display all the content in one convenient location. Subscribers can even access feeds via their mobile devices or email.

Why Syndicate?

Syndication is a simple and low cost way to get your name and content in front of new readers and remind existing readers that it's time to pay your site another visit. A feed is easy to set up, and once you've got one, subscribers automatically receive new content whenever you update. And it's much less hassle than other, more traditional methods of pulling in readers, such as newsletters. With a syndicated feed, you have no spam filters to battle, no shifting email addresses to manage.

Who Subscribes to Syndicated Feeds?

A person who subscribes to feeds is a person who's looking to keep life simple. Rather than visit each of their favorite sites individually to see what's new, feed subscribers simply scan their syndicated headlines (or photos, or podcasts, etc.) and click through to get the rest of the story. People can even feature syndicated feeds on their blogs or public My Yahoo! page for their own readers to enjoy.
Subscribers win because they get a nice overview of what's going on without having to visit multiple sites, and you win because you attract more readers while also helping to retain your existing readership. And all you have to do is set up your feed.

Prepare Your Feed

A feed is a file on your webserver just like any other webpage except that it contains pointers to recent updates. Instead of ending in .html or .htm, most feed files end in .xml or .rdf. Once this file is in place, most blogging software packages update this file automatically with pointers to your latest content. This file is then fetched by feed-reading software so that when you publish new content on your site, it automatically pushed to your subscribers. Best of all, it's incredibly easy to set up a feed. In fact, you may already have one.

Popular blog-hosting services such as Blogger and Typepad create feeds for you, as does blogging software such as MovableType and Wordpress. And many others offer built-in tools to help you publish and update your feed. Your feed will be one of two types: RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") or Atom. Both do essentially the same thing, and both are supported by Yahoo! (for more details about specific Atom and RSS versions, visit YPN Guide to Syndication FAQ: Supported Feeds).

Here are some tips to locating your feed at some popular hosting services:

Yahoo! 360°
Once you make your blog public, a feed automatically appears at the bottom of your blog, which you can see by looking at the public view of your 360° page.
For more information: Yahoo! 360° Help

Blogger "Blogspot"
If your blog URL is:http://[USERNAME].blogspot.comThen your feed URL is:http://[USERNAME].blogspot.com/atom.xml
For more information: Syndication FAQ for Blogger

MSN Spaces
If your blog URL is:http://spaces.msn.com/members/[USERNAME]Then your feed URL is:http://spaces.msn.com/members/[USERNAME]/feed.rss

Typepad
If your blog URL is:http://[USERNAME].typepad.comOr:http://[USERNAME].blogs.comThen your feed URL is one of the following:http://[USERNAME].typepad.com/[TITLE]/index.rdfOr:http://[USERNAME].blogs.com/[TITLE]/index.rdf
For more information: Syndication FAQ for Typepad

Autodiscover Your Feed
If you're unable to locate your feed through your blog host, another method you can use to discover the presence of a feed on your website or blog is Autodiscovery. To see if your website currently supports Autodiscovery, visit your site using the Yahoo! Toolbar, Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox. If the Yahoo! Toolbar has a blue "plus" sign next to the My Yahoo! button on the toolbar, or the feed icon is illuminated in the IE7 navigation bar, or Firefox has an orange box highlighted in the lower right corner, then your feed has already been detected. For more details, visit YPN Guide to Syndication FAQ: Autodiscovery.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Feed
Select a meaningful title and description for your blog: Feeds that are automatically generated by blog-hosting services typically are given a title based on the name of the blog itself. However, if you have direct access to your website's feed, pay close attention to the title and description you select. A good title can markedly increase the likelihood that your feed will attract new readers. Because you can never predict how users will search for your feed, you should also provide a thoughtful, accurate, and descriptive summary. We recommend the following naming convention: "Provider: Sub-Topic." For example, a digital photography feed from Gizmodo might be titled, "Gizmodo: Digital Cameras." And for the description, try to include key topics as well as commonly known names for your site/publication (for example, both "San Francisco Chronicle" and "SFGATE").

Select a single, stable URL for your feed:
If you're responsible for establishing your own feed, be careful to give it a file name and location that you're happy with for the long term. Changing URLs or filenames later on can result in a frustrating experience for existing subscribers. From their perspective, your feed (and thus your site) will stop updating because their feed reader will be looking for a file that is either no longer there or is "stale" because it is no longer updating. Your subscribers will have to find your new feed and resubscribe to resume coverage. Changing URLs also causes confusion for new subscribers because it creates duplicate entries in the Yahoo! feed database. Note: If your blog-hosting service automatically generates your feed, then this probably isn't going to be a problem.

Another way to address the problem of multiple feeds is to sign up with a feed-management service such as FeedBurner, which assigns your feed a permanent URL. So if the location of your feed ever changes (for example, you move to a new blog-hosting service), you don't have to worry about your subscribers switching to the new address. All you have to do is change your account settings to assign the new feed to the same old static URL.

Validate your feed:
Test to make sure your feed is properly formatted by running it through the Feed Validator.

Submit Your Feed

Once you've located your feed and made sure it's valid, you're ready to start spreading the good news. Yahoo! is one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Web, and My Yahoo! is one of world's most popular feed readers. Why not tap into that wealth of opportunity and get your feed some new subscribers?

When users click the Add Content button on My Yahoo!, they're presented with two options: Find Content (which lets them search for syndicated content in the Yahoo! Feed Database), or Browse by Topic (which lets them explore the Browse-by-Topic Directory of feeds). Any time someone subscribes to your feed via My Yahoo!, the feed is automatically added to the Yahoo! Feed Database so if you already have a number of My Yahoo! subscribers you will not have to manually submit it for inclusion. If you have a new site, make sure your content gets the visibility it deserves and submit your feed to both options.

The Yahoo! Feed Database
To have your feed included in the Database, simply enter the URL of your feed below. Please note: Before you can add your feed to the Yahoo! Feed Database, you must sign in to My Yahoo! using your Yahoo! ID. Sign in or sign up now.

Enter the URL of your feed and add it to your My Yahoo! page and the Yahoo! Feed Database:
Be sure to click the "add" button on the following screen.

Multiple feeds must be entered into the Database one at time. Publishers who need to enter more than 100 feeds should fill out the Bulk Feed Addition form. Users who prefer not to have their feed listed in the Yahoo! Feed Database can visit YPN Guide to Syndication FAQ: Opting Out for more details.

The Yahoo! Browse-by-Topic Directory
Once your feed is in the Yahoo! Feed Database, you can also apply to have it included in the Yahoo! Browse-by-Topic Directory, which features a selection of feeds that are handpicked and categorized by Yahoo! editors. Please note: Admission to the Browse-by-Topic Directory is subject to approval by the Yahoo! editorial staff, who also reserve the right to edit all feed titles and descriptions.

Submit your feed to the Browse-by-Topic Directory.

Submit Your Movies, Pics, and Podcasts
To distribute multimedia content such as audio files (podcasts), images, and digital video, use the "Media RSS" module, which supplements the enclosure capabilities of RSS 2.0. For more details, visit the Media RSS Syndication FAQ.

Turn Visitors into Subscribers
Another way to attract more subscribers is to make it temptingly easy for the people who visit your site to subscribe to your feed. All it takes is a handy Add to My Yahoo! button, which gives users a one-click way to access your syndicated content.
To create the HTML you need to implement the Add to My Yahoo! button, simply follow these three simple steps:
Step 1 – Please read our terms and conditions before using either of the Add to My Yahoo! buttons.

Step 2 – Choose the button style.
Long button
Short button with text

Step 3 – Tell us about your feed.
Feed URL
Feed Name
Publisher's Name

Now copy your customized HTML code and paste it into your webpage wherever you'd like your Add to My Yahoo! button to appear.

Manage Your Feed

Now that your feed is in place and attracting new subscribers, it's time to make sure your content arrives on time, looks just the way it you like it, and gets the clicks it deserves.

Don't Be Late
Yahoo! checks your feed for updates anywhere from once every half hour to once a day, depending on how often you typically update your content. If you'd like your latest updates to immediately appear in your feed, you need to instruct Yahoo! to look for fresh content.

You can do so manually by visiting the following URL via your browser:http://ping.feeds.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=[THE URL OF YOUR FEED]

Or you can configure your feed to automatically notify Yahoo! whenever you update. For more information about how this is done, please visit YPN Guide to Syndication FAQ: Automatic Check for Updates.

A Hint or Whole Hog?
How much of your content do you want to give your subscribers: The full story? Just the titles? Most blog-hosting services offer an easy way to let you set how much of your content that subscribers see. If you're hoping to drive more traffic back to your site, then you might want to set your feed to distribute only the title with a link to your site. But if you're more interested in simply getting your news out to the masses, then give users everything you've got.

A Sense of Order
Syndicated content typically displays in reverse chronological order (with the most recent entries first), and most blog-hosting services set up your feed to deliver content this way. Site developers who have direct access to their own feeds may choose to exercise editorial control within their feeds by prioritizing certain key stories. My Yahoo! will display whatever configuration you establish in your feed, so you can tweak your display until it's sorted to your liking. For more information about how this is done, visit YPN Guide to Syndication FAQ: Reprioritize Content.

Track Your Success
Yahoo! currently tracks and reports the number of active subscribers and the total number of pageviews for those subscribers for each of your feeds. This information can be found in your logfiles, under the user agent "YahooFeedSeeker."

Here is an example of access log information: 66.218.65.52 - - [23/Mar/2004:08:13:30 -0800]
"GET /blog/rss2.xml HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-"
"YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0;
MSIE 5.5; http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html;
users 236; views 36994)"

Another way to access your feed logs is by hosting your feed via a service like FeedBurner, which offers built-in traffic tracking and analysis tools.

For more details about tracking your feed traffic via Yahoo!, visit YPN Guide to Syndication FAQ: Feed Traffic Data.

http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/

How RSS Can Help You Save Time and Money

What is RSS?

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is an XML-based format for content distribution on the Internet. It’s an excellent way for Internet users to get updated news content and online articles -- the stuff you want -- without having to search for it.

How Does RSS Work?

Basically, when a new article is posted or a change made to a webpage, RSS keeps track of the changes and delivers them to you. RSS feeds are most often attached to text, images, podcasts and video, but they can be used with any document (word processing and spreadsheets) that has content that changes.

Who Benefits From RSS?

Anyone who has been frustrated at the time it takes to find what you want on the Internet can appreciate the time-saving feature of RSS. If there are web pages you visit daily or regularly – let’s say you always read the front page of The New York Times and your best friend’s weblog – RSS eliminate the need to check for updates. Every time something changes on the page, it comes to you. RSS always shows the most-recent changes.

How Do I Use RSS?

To view RSS feeds, you need an RSS reader (also called an aggregator), which trolls RSS feeds across the Web to regularly update content. All are pretty easy to use, offering users the chance to read, e-mail, save or clip content with a click of the mouse. There are many free, web-based readers, all which compile and update feeds, all which allow anonymous access to their feeds from any computer with Internet access. For heavier users, there are desktop, application-based readers that offer more features.

What Can RSS Help Me Do?

One of the original uses for RSS is the ability to create a personal newspaper with new content updated every morning. Beyond that, on the short list of things RSS can do is make it easy to search for and organize information about a particular topic, keep up with your kid’s homework, track packages, find cheap airfares or follow e-Bay auctions and sales. You can get your horoscope, search for jobs, read your favorite comics, get software updates, keep up with other people’s schedules and follow calendar listings for your favorite clubs and venues. You can see what others are saying about your favorite sports teams or keep up with what others are saying about your favorite (or least-favorite) celebrity. All without surfing through pop-up ads, slow downloads and poorly navigated sites. RSS saves time. It’s as simple as that.

Can I Access RSS Only Through a Computer?

You can access RSS feeds on mobiles device and many cell phones or via e-mail as well as on a computer.

What is a Feed?

A feed is similar to a bookmark in a web browser. If you subscribe to the feed of the New York Times home page, for instance, you will always see the latest content from that page in your reader. You can create special search feeds for specific words or phrases, which can be extremely useful for research, or clip content you find for later use or sharing with others. Put another way, a feed is a website that changes.

What is a Post?

In your web reader, each feed shows new articles, or posts, in a list. The reader allows you to read the article on its original page, mark the article as read, rate it, e-mail or IM it to friends or clip it for future reference in a folder.

Who Publishes Content in RSS?

Most online news and information sites publish RSS feeds, and more are being added every day. Part of the popularity of weblogs, or blogs, is that the software that creates them have RSS capability, which allows friends and other people to subscribe and share content.

How Do I "Subscribe" to a Feed?

There are various ways. You may see the big orange symbol on web pages, which is a link to the RSS feed or a page of feeds. Copy the url (the web address) of the feed you want and paste it in your reader to subscribe. Many pages offer one-click subscription to well-known aggregators like NewsGator, Bloglines, Rojo and Google Reader. The latest versions of the popular web browsers Internet Explorer and Firefox and Apple’s Safari now incorporate RSS feeds into their bookmark programs. If your bookmarks are showing updated content, you are subscribed to RSS feeds and you don’t even know it.

Is RSS a Substitute For E-mail?

No. E-mail is a two-way communication channel. RSS merely keeps content current. However, they both work together, and you can receive RSS content through e-mail.

What Are Podcasts?

Podcasts are digital files recorded for downloading through RSS feeds for playback. RSS allows users to download podcasts to computers or mobile devices for playback at any time.

http://www.newsgator.com/RssLearningCenter/Default.aspx