Saturday, August 05, 2006

Understanding RSS Feed

I have been hearing about RSS Feed for a long time and being a ordinary mortal ( not a computer whiz ) wondered what it was?

Guys it' s simple !
An RSS Feed is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web Syndication.

Confused ? All Greek and Latin?

Well, here's for computer dummies like me.

1. What does RSS stand for?
- Besides a lot of other things , RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

2. What is a web feed format?
- Web feed formats are XML- based documents which contain content sites such as summaries of stories or blog posts with web links to longer versions.

3. And what is Web Syndication?
- Web Syndication is Publishing your web feed i.e making available your web feed to information sources like a blog.

4. What does RSS do?
- RSS allows people to add links to your content within their own web pages. For example , You publish a new web page and want others interested in that topic to know about it . By listing that page as an a 'item' in your RSS Feed, you can have that page appear in front of those who read information using RSS reader or 'news aggregator'.

5. So, how is RSS useful to me?
- As an RSS text file contains both static information about your site and dynamic information about your new stories, it becomes an easy way to draw attention to your material bringing you some traffic and hopefully a little net fame.

Summing up, an RSS is a distributable " What's New" for your site , which helps in increasing web traffic and gathering and distributing news.