The Lazy Person's Guide to RSS
Are you sick and tired of hearing about RSS-this and XML-that without knowing what the heck they are? I was, so I did something about it. It was hard work. And there's no point in both of us doing the same hard work so if you want a quick and easy RSS solution in plain English you came to the right place.
Setting up an RSS Feed for your website is easier than you think! I just did it yesterday and now I'm going to write it all down so I remember how to do it in the future.
What is RSS? RSS is a way to syndicate content. RSS either stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. No one seems to know for sure. The long and short of it is that it allows users to know when a website is updated without them having to visit it. Instead they subscribe to your RSS feed with a tool that can interpret the feeds. This can be a news aggregator or a browser like Firefox or even My Yahoo!. (Sage is RSS feed aggregator written as a Firefox extension.)
A
news aggregator is going to interpret the feeds and allow you to pool them
all together so you can view them. To find a website's feed look for the
little orange XML rectangle:
. If you're super
styling like me you can even make your own XML button. The RSS feed is
encoded in XML. This is the most
common scenario but sometimes the link will be a blue RSS rectangle or a gold
Atom rectangle. This link is what you plug into your news aggregator.
If you're using
Firefox
you can simply click the RSS button
that will appear in the status
bar and add it to your Bookmark Toolbar Folder. Now you've created a live
bookmark that will update automatically!
Sweet! But you want to create your own feed! It's easy. All you need is an RSS template (the format is freely available so you can just take someone else's file and swap in your info.) or better yet a program that will create an XML file for you. I use ListGarden which is dead easy and will create a nice little XML file for you. After defining your feed you simply add your items:
Fill out the form for each item thusly:
Publish the XML file to your server.
Now your feed is up-to-date and everyone who subscribes to it will see your fun updates! You can also do some trick stuff like providing your feed as a snippet for other bloggers to cut and paste into their blogs:
Or if you really want to get fancy you can maintain an HTML version of your feed and provide a link to the XML file from there. That way when people click your XML link they won't see the raw XML code but a properly formatted, human readable document and a link to the feed and even instructions on how to add the link to an aggregator. That's what made XML so confusing to me for so long. I'd click the link, see the code and think "Now what?" I didn't realize that the only reason to link to it was so that I could cut the file's URL from the address bar and paste it into an aggregator.
Is RSS worth your time and trouble? Probably not unless you've got a pretty popular blog. Personally, I'm a bit of a masochist so I'm sure I'll do the extra work to maintain my feed. (I mean dang, I have to hand code each comment snippet on my blog. I'm not some wimp on Blogger or something with its fancy autogenerated commenting and customized content managment.) Besides it's hard to let it go now just after I figured it out. It may turn out though that RSS becomes the main method of publishing a blog or news site to the Web. No need for a website anymore; just post your information and let the aggregator sort it out. But just as a way to publish a lot of links quickly RSS can't be beat. It's something to consider.
Have fun!