What is RSS: The letters RSS have several different meanings depending on who you ask, but the most popular and widely used meaning for the abbreviation is Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a simple way for a website to send out information to other websites, blogs, RSS feed-readers etc so that they can read the information the website is sending out and can then reproduce it in a manner they see fit.
How is RSS used if I’m a home or business user: Let’s say you want to keep up with the latest news from several different websites, but you don’t want to have to go visit them each day. You can subscribe to each website’s RSS feed, and then read those feeds in a piece of software of your choice. For example, Windows Vista comes with an RSS feed-reader as one of its standard sidebar widgets. You can add the feed from the website(s) you’re interested in and the latest news from each of those sites will automatically be updated by the widget when new news comes along – you don’t have to do anything!
Today’s most popular browsers, Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3, both come with built-in RSS feed-readers as well. When you go to a website that has an RSS feed you’ll see the small orange RSS feed icon appear in the browser bar. When you click on that you’ll be taken to a page that looks like this:
http://edition.cnn.com/services/rss/?iref=rssmorenews
with a subscribe button near the top of the page. Click the button to add the feed from this page to your browser so you can see when new content is added to the page without having to go back and manually check.
How can I use RSS on my website: This is perhaps one of the most interesting uses of RSS as it allows you to show content from another website on your own site. Let’s say you would like to show the latest posts from a popular blog or news site on your own website. To do this you can either custom-make your own code, or use a piece of code (frequently JavaScript is used for this purpose) to read from the RSS feed and show that information on your site. A website called Dynamic Drive has a lot of excellent ready-made scripts for just this purpose.
Many open-source content management system projects, such as Joomla, have extensions or plugins that allow you to show external RSS feeds on your site as well. Open source CMS’s are becoming more and more popular and provide an excellent way of building a cost-effective website with minimal knowledge.
It is very important to note that you should always check the Terms of Service or publisher guidelines before using anyone’s RSS content on your own website. If in doubt always contact the website owner first.
In most cases an RSS feed will contain the title of the article, a brief description of it and a link back to the originating website of the article where you can view the article in full. Sometimes, such as Google’s RSS feed for its news service, it will also contain an image. This lack of in-depth content is one of the pitfalls of RSS – in almost all cases to view the whole story your visitor will have to leave your site and go to the originating website. In most cases you will also have to give credit on your own site to the source of the RSS feed. Even if it is not requested by the originating website, it is often a pleasant courtesy to place some form of credit on your site.
Conclusion: Really Simple Syndication is a boon for both users and publishers. It gives individuals the ability to keep tabs on fast-flowing information without having to trawl through multiple websites to find it. It also gives publishers - particularly webmasters - the ability to display fresh, constantly updated content.
Paul is a founding member of http://www.GlobalBusinessNetworking.com, an online business networking website. He is fairly new to writing articles, but has had tremendous fun writing his own blog and other material for the site. He'd very much appreciate any constructive feedback on his articles.
Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/RSS-for-Users-and-Webmasters-–-A-Simple-Explanation/446389
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