A Brief Discussion of RSS and Web Syndication

RSS is a three letter acronym that currently stands for Really Simple Syndication - you can read more about it from the Wikipedia.

Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. RSS, in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator.

RSS makes reading blogs a lot easier. Lets say you read 12 different blogs. Well, each day you could check each of the 12 bog sites to see if there is a new post, or you could add the sites’ RSS files to an aggregator. With the second option each day you would check your reader and it would let you know which blogs have been updated since the last time you checked. The RSS file for each site is updated each time the site owner posts something new.

Certain sites (like Blogger, Livejournal) will create these files for you automatically. For example the rss file for my Blogger site is:

http://blog.jlandis.org/rss.xml

and most are stored as:

http://yourbloggername.blogger.com/rss.xml

You will notice that some sites have these images associated with their page:

Those picture indicate that the site has an RSS feed.

There are a number of aggregators available: google search can provide a nice list. I currently use Google Reader (I tend to like google, and I already use their GMAIL service).

Now, to confuse things even more some sites use ATOM syndication. You once again can read up on it, but basically it can does the same thing RSS, but with a slight variation.