What is this RSS stuff?
by Randall McCarley
October 20th, 2006
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or sometimes Rich Site Summary. RSS is a very powerful tool for getting your message out!
RSS is just a subset of XML. It is a text file with specific tags used for the markup (similar to markup languages you may be familiar with like HTML). The file created is called a feed. That feed is then interpreted and displayed by feed readers.
RSS feeds are stored as either filename.rss or fileame.xml. You can recognize sites with RSS feeds by their icons but there is a standard icon that is (amazingly enough) endorsed by both Mozilla and Microsoft.
Some programs create and update the feed automatically like blogs and forums. Then visitors can subscribe to the feed. This makes getting information very convenient for them. I subscribe to over 40 80 blogs. It takes me about 40 minutes to sift through them (longer if something is really juicy). Before I set up my own feed reader it took hours out of my schedule each day just to “keep up”.
So the benefit of syndicating an RSS feed for you is it makes your content easy to promote. The benefit to your viewers is it makes it easy for them to enjoy your content.
The biggest problem with RSS is there is more than one version and now there are several proprietary versions as well. This makes learning it and understanding it a bit difficult. It also means making a choice as to which viewers you will give the most support for.
I get around this by using FeedBurner. FeedBurner offers several free services including tracking tools but one of the coolest is optimizing your feed. FeedBurner’s SmartFeed claims to:
Reach the widest possible audience by consolidating your subscription links into one feed that works in any reader, on the desktop, web, mobile devices and beyond.
Another problem with RSS is that it gives your content to people away from your site. The content in your feed has to lure the viewers back. There are several ways to do this including special offers that are linked to from the feed or generating discussions your viewers are passionate about. You can also clip the amount of content that goes out to the first 500 characters (actually, you can set whatever limit you want). This offers a “teaser” and if the viewer wants the whole story they have to click through. In fact, some programs let you set up custom teasers allowing you to draft a very enticing greeting!
One of the biggest benefits of syndicating a feed is that other sites can pull your feed exposing your message to their viewers. I use RSS2HTML for my sites, including the home page that pulls from my own feed and the Essential Web Development RSS Feeds reader
that I use to read my favorite blogs (though this has become rather cumbersome and I am transitioning to Bloglines).
The down-side to this is your content can end up on some interesting web sites. Sites you may not endorse. It comes with the territory.
A creative use for RSS feeds is creating your own feed based on your navigation and submitting that to various services so get some quick (though temporary) links. This helps your site get indexed fast and can lead to exposure that gets you some permanent link-love.
The killer two-punch combo for tracking your feed is using Technorati to track who links to the pages listed in your feed and Feedburner to track who uses your feed. These free services give you some great insight into how your content is being assimilated by the masses.
Like it or not, understand it or not, RSS feeds are being used everywhere from “My Yahoo” to Google News. You are probably using RSS feeds every day without even realizing it!
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