Your complete guide to RSS – Part 1 – Introduction

Before everything else, I should say, yes! I heard you. I know, why the heck should my RSS readers read an article about what RSS is since that all the bloggers know about RSS. Well, number one, you will be so surprised at the number of bloggers who have absolutely no idea of what RSS is. Number two, even if you know a whole lot about RSS, this 5-part guide will be hitting to the depths of RSS and promoting some cool tools that might just make your life a little bit easier.

So, here starts a 5-part guide to RSS covering almost every aspect of it. In the coming 5 days, after this guide is complete, you’ll see how much you’ve missed on RSS. So, with that?

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really-Simple-Syndication. It runs on the XML platform, promoting your site/blog content in XML. It’s also called a web feed. Why bloggers should care is because it gives you the ability to promote you content to the door-steps of your mass-audiences.

If someone likes to read 10 blogs that gets updated twice a day, then he/she can subscribe to those blogs’ RSS feed and read everything via the RSS reader. In simplest form, it’s like subscribing to a magazine. You don’t have to go to some place to read it all, but you get it all to your doorstep. Only with a blog – it’s totally free.

Atom and RSS

Atom is also an XML based platform, much like RSS, It’s another way to promote your blog’s feed; but a bit different. Technically, Atom is more sophisticated than RSS. And if you’re using a standard blog platform, you will see both Atom and RSS feeds built-in. RSS is more widely used than Atom in the publishing community, just because it doesn’t complicate the syndication process. If you want a technical analysis of differences between RSS and Atom, check Wikipedia’s Atom Compared to RSS 2.0 article.

What is a RSS Reader?

RSS reader allows you to subscribe to a blog’s RSS Feed; basically getting that blog’s content delivered right to you as it gets published. If you’re looking for a RSS Reader, Google Reader is probably the best online one or offline. Why? With the installation of Google Gears, it can now display all you content offline as well.

But I think the most widely used RSS Reader is BlogLines. Other than that, Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox 2 offer built-in RSS Readers. And Outlook 2007 also features a really good RSS reader.

So this basically sums up the intro on RSS. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s episode on “Why should you offer an RSS Feed?”. Yes, this was an obvious-kind of post wasn’t it? Don’t worry, we’ll hit the real roads tomorrow.

Further Reading

• Do you use RSS? – JohnChow.com
• Introduction to RSS – WebReference.com
• RSS – Wikipedia