Michigan Web Design Blog

RSS what is it and why do I need it?

Do you know how much information is out there on the internet?  The information can be overwhelming, especially if you want to stay in touch with current events or keep up with your industry.  If CNN publishes hundreds of articles a day, and there are 20 websites you visit to get information on breaking news in your industry, how is it possible to stay up to date? You don’t want to check every website every day, what if nothing is posted?  Or perhaps you don’t keep up on news now because its such a pain, but you would really love to.  Well I am happy to announce RSS or to those who are not familiar with it, it stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Well what is it? Technically it is an electronic data publication standard that websites are now using to publish news and their web log entries (blogs).  Imagine for a second the CNN homepage if you can, there are many headlines, pictures and information of varying types on the website.  But, Perhaps you are only interested in the business news, if you access the business section you should see a little orange ICON with three bars, or an orange icon that reads XML on it. That means that CNN is using the RSS standard to publish it’s news.   When a web developer or company have the RSS icon on their site or have an area labled ‘feeds’ or ‘rssfeeds’  that means they are allowing their data to be easily transferred to other parties over the internet.  What’s easy about it? The RSS format is always the same, contains a list of items that each have a Title, a body of content, and a link to the full article.  Every RSS feed is formatted the same which means people can write programs to gather that data and display it on their own website, or an easy to use feed reader.

Enough with the technicalities, how can you start benefitting from it today?  If you are not using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer download it today, it has a great way to organize your RSS feeds.  If you run a Mac or alternative operating system than Windows you can download Mozilla Firefox.
While browsing the internet, Internet Explorer will actually find any RSS feeds on a webpage and show you the orange icon in your web browsers tool bar.  You can then click on your toolbar to see which feeds it found on the website and select the one you are interested in.  Internet Explorer will then show you the detailed articles in the feed and have an option to ‘subscribe.’

After you go out to all your favorite websites and subscribe to the feeds you are interested in, then what?  Well, now the fun part!  Whenever any of those websites adds a news story or a web post to their website it will be updated in your RSS reader such as Internet Explorer automatically.  This will allow you to use your Internet Explorer RSS reader to go to one place to catch up with all your news, and only have to read the new ones.   All of the news will be formatted consistently so you can quickly read through them and you will no longer have to scour the net for the latest and greatest information. 

It will find you!

Here are some popular news readers, also known as news aggregators:

• Internet Explorer 7
• Mozilla Firefox
• Bloglines.com (Kevin and I use bloglines)
• Newsgator
• Google Reader