RSS (v.1.0)

I’ve been thinking about how I would write about RSS on this blog. I wasn’t sure I would, at first. Because RSS is a web-based phenomenon, there are already gigabytes and gigabytes worth of stuff available, much of it really well-written and clear. And, really, I think it is more complicated trying to explain RSS than it is to actually use it! I decided to try anyway, because it is good writing practice, and because I have been asked to (by Suzanne, and My Boss!).

The term RSS does seem to be mentioned a lot these days. Many sites now display that small orange RSS icon all over their pages. Check out the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, or the BBC news website, for example.

RSS is a way of formatting and delivering data. It is used as a way of syndicating information, and it “provides an instant summary of new content appearing in a web site or blog. RSS makes new content available not only in the website or blog where it originates, but on your desktop.” (This was written by my colleague SGS who has a much better way with words than me. You may decide to just stop reading this entry and continue with her nice description of RSS instead!)

If you click an RSS icon you will see a page of what appears to be code – RSS feeds do not display correctly in a regular web browser. This is because the information is written in a particular format; an analogy would be if you tried to open a PowerPoint presentation in your word processor – the word processor would not be able to display the presentation in the correct format. To view anything that is in RSS format, you need to use an RSS reader (also known as an aggregator or news reader).

There are loads of RSS readers available out there – Wikipedia has an extensive list. There are two main types of RSS readers. (Actually there are more types, but I don’t want to talk about them here.) The first type consists of programs that can be downloaded and installed on your computer. You may need to experiment with a few to see which suits you. I’ve tried RSSReader and SharpReader and both worked well on my PC.

The second type is the web-based variety, where you creates an account with the service, which checks the feeds regularly and allows them to be read using your browser. Examples of web-based feed readers are Bloglines and Kinja.

Once you have chosen the RSS reader that suits you, you use it to subscribe to the RSS feeds of any blogs or websites you are interested in. The RSS reader periodically checks the feeds subscribed to for any updates or changes to the sites, and provides you with a headline and a short easy-to-scan summary of each article or update, with links to the full articles. You can skim these headlines and summaries easily and only read the full article if it catches your attention.

I really like Bloglines and use it as my main aggregator. It suits me as I work on about four different computers every week! I don’t need to worry about keeping four different installations of a desktop RSS reader – with Bloglines I can log into the same list of feeds wherever I am. There is a very nice tutorial on using Bloglines available, written by Preetam Rai (thanks, Preetam, and thanks to the Rambling Librarian for the link).

If you are subscribed to the RSS feed of a blog (any blog!) you don’t need to compulsively check to see if your favourite author has posted a new entry – your RSS reader will tell you! In my experience, most blog hosting sites (Blogger, for example) automatically generate the RSS feeds for each blog that lives on their servers. This means inexperienced bloggers, like me, do not need to worry about how to create the feed for their blog.

At the moment, people talking about RSS often mention blogs at the same time. Initially I found this a bit confusing because I didn’t understand what ‘personal online diaries’ (this was my idea of what blogs were) had to do with RSS. I now understand why this link has happened – because blogs are so popular, and because most blogs have RSS feeds, the number of available feeds is huge, RSS too has become popular, and the usefulness of RSS is very obvious. Business is starting to get into RSS, as is academia (and academic libraries!).

I haven’t said anything about what the letters ‘RSS’ stand for. When I first started investigating RSS, I found it very confusing because different sources would say different things. RSS may stand for RDF (Resource Description Format) Site Summary (I really dislike acronyms within acronyms!), Rich Site Summary , Really Simple Syndication, or Really Stops Spam. One version is not even called RSS, butThere is also Atom, another Web syndication format [Edited 24 July 2005; thanks M!]. This is because of the way RSS has developed over the years, with different competing groups working on their own versions…

In the end, though, as Steve Shaw says, it doesn’t matter what RSS stands for: “RSS is just another language of the web, but you can actually completely ignore the code itself, just like you can ignore the source code behind web pages that you visit – you are only interested in the end product that the code is designed to produce for you, the end user.” The content is what matters.

This post is becoming painfully long, and I keep wanting to rewrite bits, but I am going to stop for now before it gets any worse. Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. I will add to it as I go (or maybe write more posts on the topic. Lots more I could add, like information on interesting feeds, and various other uses for RSS, for example, but maybe I should leave that for my other blog).

Categories: RSS