RSS feed how to. Your guide to Really Simple Syndication (or Rich Site Summary if you prefer) and news feed aggregators.

If you are reading this page to find out what a RSS is, then continue reading. If you landed here after looking for info on RSS, continue reading, chances are you'll find some useful info on the topic. If you want to look at all of this blog available feeds, skip to this blog feeds list.

What RSS is

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary for versions until 1.0. RSS is an XML based format for content distribution. Actually, RSS is a family of web feed formats, an umbrella term containing different standards.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

A slightly different version of the RSS standard is represented by the Atom Syndication Format, an XML language used for web feeds itself, born as an effort to unify all the RSS flavours.

To find out more on this topic, Wikipedia is a nice starting point: RSS, for an overview of syndications file formats the following Wikipedia post might help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndication_format_family_tree.

RSS readers, news aggregators and feeds viewers

To read a news feed in RSS you need a client application (examples of client applications are among the others your email software of choice, Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) called aggregator or news aggregator or feed reader.

There are mainly two kinds of aggregators, online and offline (think of this as Gmail and Thunderbird). Speaking of online aggregators, Google Reader is the one I'm using, though there's plenty of online aggregators on the web, some of them are specialized on defined topics, some are general oriented.

The offline (offline as in Thunderbird, you have to be connected to the net to download at least the headers) are normally internet browser plugins or desktop applications. They act like an interpreter, giving you the chance to read your feed in the browser as a standard web page.

Internet Explorer 7 has built-in RSS reading features:

Internet Explorer 7 automatically detects RSS feeds on sites and illuminates an icon on the toolbar. A single click on the icon allows you to preview and subscribe to the RSS feed if you want—so you’re automatically notified as content is updated. Read RSS feeds directly in the browser, scan for important stories, and filter your view with search terms or site-specific categories.

Select the following link for a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPML.

This blog offers an OPML file for its categories feed, download it here: The blog that exploded: feeds by category.

If you want to read more on RSS feeds, have a look at the following report on the New York Times by John R. Quain.