What is RSS?

Many people are new to the concept of RSS so we put together a tutorial to teach you some basics. You will learn what RSS is; What are its benefits; and how to  subscribe to the feeds on RBS and other sites.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary and is a format for delivering regularly changing web content.  RSS is being used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites without having to keep going back to the site until you want to.  Most news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it. That, in a nutshell, is what RSS feeds are all about: Let the information come to you instead of you actively searching for it.

What are the Benefits of RSS?

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site’s email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News, CNN, MSNBC and many, many others.

Why not just bookmark the site(s)? The problems with bookmarking is you as the web surfer have to do all the work; It can get complicated when you are trying to track many websites at once; You miss information when you forget to check your bookmarks; and, You end up seeing the same information over and over again on sites that don’t update very often.

What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed?

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.  Feed reader are free and there are many, many feed readers available – however a good place to start is with a couple of free and easy to use web based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines.  Either one will do if you’re starting out but we recommend Google’s Reader.  In addition, browser like Bing (formerly MSN) and Firefox, as well as search engines like Yahoo offer news aggregators.

Feed readers work like email. As you subscribe to feeds you’ll see that unread entries from the sites you’re tracking will be marked as bold. As you click on them you’ll see the latest update and can read it right there in the feed reader. You are given the option to click through to the actual site or move onto the next unread item – marking the last one as ‘read’.  Google reader look almost exactly like Gmail on Google.

The best way to learn how to use feed readers is get a free account and subscribe to some feeds from some of your favorite sites. Most services have tutorial or help sections to get you up and running.

How Do I Subscribe To A Feed?

There are two places to look for a site’s feed:

1. On the Site
2. In Your Browser

On Site Subscription
You may have asked yourself, “What are those strange little orange buttons?”  You will often see that a site has RSS content, or a feed (sometimes called a channel), when you notice a small button (usually an orange color) with the acronym RSS, XML, ATOM on it. They come in all shapes and sizes. Click on that button to subscribe to the site’s feed.

However, many browsers are not equipped to handle RSS feeds in this raw XML format which is why you need a feed reader as mentioned above to translate the content for you. You may have already run across this if you ever clicked on an RSS link and were surprised by a bunch of computer source code instead of a Web page.

Browser Subscription

Many internet browsers now have the ability to find and subscribe to RSS feeds built right into them.

When you surf to a site you can usually tell if it has an RSS feed by looking in the right hand side of address bar where you type in the site’s URL.  If you see the little orange icon on the right hand side of the address bar, the site has a feed.  Click that and you’ll be taken to the site’s RSS feed.

For example, here’s how it looks for Renegade Business Solutions site when using Firefox:

 

 

You can easily subscribe by clicking the icon. You’ll want to set up your browser to do it with your feed reader of choice or by default you will probably subscribe using the in-browser reader. Check the settings on the your feed reader of choice to find out how to do this.

Once you’ve done this and have subscribed to a few feeds you’ll begin to see unread items in your Feed Reader and you can start reading.

To Complicated? Email is still an Option

If RSS just seems too complicated for you, there is another option. Many sites also enable you to subscribe to RSS feeds via the old familiar email. When subscribing by email just find the email subscription box on your favorite site – usually on the right hand sidebar – and enter your email address in the email field.  You will receive email updates with a summary of your favorite sites latest posts. It depends on the site how often you will receive these email updates. You can unsubscribe at any time.

On the RBS site we offer RSS and email subscriptions. You can subscribe anywhere you see the orange chicklet (right sidebar) or email subscription form (right sidebar and upper right side page banner).

We hope this helps you understand RSS . Below is a video done by Common Craft that further explains RSS. Enjoy!

The Renegade Business Solutions Team

RSS IN PLAIN ENGLISH BY COMMON CRAFT

Internet: Useful Tips:
RSS In Plain English