Introduction to RSS
You’ve no doubt seen the orange ‘RSS’ or ‘XML’ labels on the sidebar of a range of websites. But perhaps you’re not entirely sure what RSS is, and what it could do for your organisation’s site. We can help.
— Published December 16th, 2005 | by David Moore | 2 Comments
RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication” (or “Rich Site Summary”, if you believe some people), and at its most basic, it ensures that any new content on sites you’re interested in comes to you.
How do I use it?
Using a program known as a newsreader or news aggregator, you subscribe to the feeds offered by sites and then the newsreader pulls down the latest updates from the site for you to read at your leisure.
Recommended Mac newsreaders include NetNewsWire Lite, and NewsFire. For PC, try Feedreader or SharpReader.
What content is available?
Where do we start? Almost all the major news organisations offer a range of feeds. For example, the BBC offers a prodigious amount, allowing you to subscribe to a feed that gives you exactly the content you’re looking for. Here’s a good place to start on the BBC feeds.
But individual bloggers also offer feeds, and this highlights the non-technical nature of a lot of RSS-delivered content out there – if someone’s blogging about it, there’s a feed for it. For example, feed is the operative word for Jamie Oliver’s recipe-by-rss service.
Public and private organisations are also increasingly using RSS as a way to give access to their latest news releases. The UK Prime Minister’s site delivers the latest
And retailers are getting in on the act, using RSS as way to communicate their latest sales bargains or special offers without running the risk of spamming anyone (RSS is completely opt-in, remember).
What does a feed look like?
Some sites’ feeds offer the full text (with any photos or images) of each new article or blog entry, while other sites give you just the headline and the first paragraph, allowing you to scan the updates quickly, and follow a link back to the site to read the rest of the article. (There are marketing issues at work here, as even though RSS feeds can be tracked, many site owners want to drive people back to their site.)
Do I really need to install a new program?
While standalone programs give you the most flexibility and features, your existing browser might be enough to try out RSS - there are RSS plugins for Firefox, and Safari also supports RSS, albeit in a slightly confusing way. Alternatively you could try Google’s online RSS reader, or the well-established hosted solution Bloglines.
What are the benefits?
Consider how many sites are in your list of bookmarks. How many of them do you visit regularly? RSS offers the user a simple way to review new content on a large number of sites very quickly. I’m subscribed to perhaps 60 feeds in my newsreader, and can scoot through the categorised list in a few minutes every couple of days – there’s no way I’d visit those 60 sites that regularly.
Considering RSS as a better form of the email newsletter helps to show the benefits. For the user, it means not having to give out your email address to be informed of changes, and it also means your inbox is not overrun with newsletters.
For site owners, it’s a way to reach people who chose to be contacted (by subscribing), without having to deal with spam blockers, whitelists and other problems. And you don’t have to format tricky HTML mails and deal with bounces and autoresponders. (Try this blog post from Alex Barnett for a valuable comparison between email newsletters and RSS.)
Expert moves
People are always looking for new ways to use RSS. The BBC is now offering RSS videos feeds, while high-end bloggers allow you to subscribe either to the feed for the posts, or for the feed for the comments to those posts. Podcasting via RSS is also taking off, and discussion boards are offering RSS feeds for topics, so you can keep up to date without having to visit their sites all the time.
Should I be offering RSS feeds on my site?
If your site is regularly updated with news or blog entries, you should definitely consider offering an RSS feed. If you offer a range of new content, then maybe more than one feed would work better.
Many content management systems and blogging tools generate RSS feeds automatically, so moving to RSS may be less painful than you think.
If RSS is so great, why don’t you guys have a feed?
Good question. Early next year, we’ll be launching a new blog, complete with RSS feed.
Comments:
David Moore on Jan 23rd, 2006 wrote —
Thanks for the comment. I, too, am impressed with Wordpress and its range of features (and at a price that's hard to beat). I regularly use it for client projects, and the no-brainer RSS feed is hard to beat.
Paul Browne on Dec 19th, 2005 wrote —
If you're looking for a blog with RSS feeds built in , can I suggest WordPress?
I've been using it for the last couple of months and it just works - as well as the RSS feed, you get great content management, easy to configure to the style you want and integration with about every other Web 2.0 platform out there.