What is RSS and Atom feeds?
RSS stands for both “Rich Site Summary” and “Really Simple Syndication” but it always refers to the same technology.
What problem does RSS solve?
Most people are interested in many websites whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. Examples of such websites are news sites, community and religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, and weblogs. Repeatedly checking each website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious.
RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content, as it is a mean of transmitting and updating news in an automated way. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email.
The RSS feed is not human readable. It is an XML format which is designed to be read by machines rather than humans.
How does RSS work?
RSS works by having the website author maintain a list of notifications on their website in a standard way. This list of notifications is called an “RSS Feed”. People who are interested in finding out the latest headlines or changes can check this list. Special computer programs called “RSS aggregators” have been developed that automatically access the RSS feeds of websites you care about on your behalf and organize the results for you. (RSS feeds and aggregators are also sometimes called “RSS Channels” and “RSS Readers”.)
Most of them are very similar to email client programs, but instead of incoming emails, they display news from various sources (from all the feeds you have registered with, or “subscribed to” as is commonly said but it has nothing to do with money). Unread news typically appear in bold, just as unread emails do.
An RSS aggregator makes it very convenient to follow up on news from a large number of sources in a single place.
Just like there is webmail, there are also are web-RSS-aggregators. Bloglines is such an online aggregator. It allows you to track all your news from a single place you can access with a regular web browser.
Also, most modern web browsers will also handle RSS feeds, but in a limited manner. They will use an RSS feed as a dynamic bookmark folder with automatic bookmarks to all the news in the feed. Unlike aggregators, browsers will not save the news if you don’t check on them every day.
Finally, on a more professional level, some websites will aggregate news from different sources onto a single site. Hence the “syndication” in the name.
Different flavors of RSS feeds
There are different versions of RSS in use. RSS 2.0 is the most common. It is used for news/blog feeds as well as for Podcasting.
A newer format, called Atom, is a more standardized way of providing XML content updates. However, it has not gotten wide acceptance yet outside of the blog communities. (Again, almost all blog tools can generate an Atom feed on the fly.)
How to find out if a website has an RSS feed?
It is getting more and more common for websites to have RSS feeds. They usually indicate the existence of the feed on the home page or main news page with a link to “RSS”, or sometimes by displaying an orange button with the letters “XML” or “RSS”. RSS feeds are also often found via a “Syndicate This” link. Text “RSS” links sometimes (there are lots of variations) point to a web page explaining the nature of the RSS feeds provided and how to find them. The buttons are often linked directly to the RSS feed file itself.
Once you know the URL of an RSS feed, you can provide that address to an RSS aggregator program and have the aggregator monitor the feed for you. Many RSS aggregators come preconfigured with a list to choose from of RSS feed URLs for popular news websites.
Tags: aggregator, atom, content, feed, news, notification, reader, rss, website
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