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[rechard3248]

What is RSS and how it emerged:

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It is an interesting way to increase site popularity nowadays and it has revolutionized the concept of web marketing also. RSS is used to distribute latest news headlines and syndicated contents with relevant links as well, on the Web.

It was first started by Netscape as a part of My Netscape site and it expanded with Dave Winer and Userland and various versions of RSS like 0.90, 0.91 to 2.0 generated gradually.

RSS Reader
Normally the browsers do not support the XML format, so some reader is required to display the content of a feed.

RSS Reader is also known as RSS Aggregator. Mainly two types of aggregators are there, desktop aggregators and web-based aggregators. Desktop aggregators are software which when fed the URL of one RSS Feed, displays its updated content. A web-based aggregator does the same through a website.

Besides these OEM/Meta News Feeds provides aggregation service to news portals and search engines and some news aggregators have the ability to monitor and track a large number of syndicated content sources, known as clouds.

Aggregators can be combined with other applications also including web-browser, e-mail client, media player etc.

Life cycle of an RSS Feed

A site owner may wish to have his own RSS Feed. This is not a tough job. RSS is written in any editor - Notepad, or vi-editor and saved with .xml extension. Some guidelines should be maintained while developing the file. As soon as the file is written, it should be uploaded to the server. Then it needs some validation. An RSS validator is software that determines the bugs in a feed and if it detects any unknown character in the feed it gives an error message. A validated feed can be submitted to different RSS Directories and SEs, from where tremendous popularity can be achieved. Any viewer can use the feeds on his personal web page or can subscribe to a feed. In each case whenever the feed is viewed it displays its recently updated edition.

Websites can opt any of the two approaches of content management – sever side approach - the site has some reader and it displays the content of the feed and client side approach - the site cannot generate the equivalent HTML code unlike server side approach, but generates a JavaScript to display the feed content.

Scope of RSS

Though RSS has some drawbacks like incompatibility among its versions and not available in a personalized form but RSS seems to be a boon to the newsletter and email publishers. Earlier they had to send periodical information updates to their customers through e-mails and newsletters and with RSS what they can do now is just offer them the feed and once it is received by the targeted customers the sender need not worry any more.

Future of RSS is also very bright. Microsoft has started thinking on RSS and has developed a Simple Extensions List, a set of enhancements to RSS to help websites publish lists of content.

[filtalr]

Very good explanation of the RSS deal Nice work.

I think it would be nice if someone could devise a way to tell when someone subscribes to a site's RSS feed so you could tell how many subscribers you have.

[jstorz]

Good explination of a feed for general information. I have but a few comments to add...

#1 The biggest + that was not mentioned is that this greatly cuts down on the spam problem. You subscribe to feeds and can un-subscribe by simply removing the feed. They do not have direct contact (email) information and therefore cannot spam you that way

#2 Yes, filtair, there are ways to tell when someone subscribes. If the rss / xml feed is served by a program (from a database) then you can just grab the ip address (in php:$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']). After you have the referrers ip address just insert that into a file or db if it's unique along with a timestamp.

#3 How about a little practical application since this is a directory owners forum. I recently wrote a little tutorial about getting your directory fully indexed by search engines. This was done a little while ago and works but I have updated my code a bit since, perhaps I'll head back and change it eventually.

This is related to this feed thread because I noticed the rss.php was my 2nd most popular page (behind index.php) and I had 0 links pointing to it. What happened is that many spiders visit that page 1st hoping to find a xml version of a site map. From there the spiders can visit the most updated pages, which is kind of the point of a feed, the freshest article goes first.

Hope this helps someone.

Viva la RSS ~ they will eventually replace email (thank God)

[hussyjack]

It is really nice post. I like it

[James Donovan]

Thanks for share this valuable information...