What is RSS Feed?

RSS feed is a method of distributing links to content in your website, content that you'd like others to use. It's a mechanism to "syndicate" your website content.

A common comparison that might help you understand how syndication works, is to think about comic strips, those cartoons commonly found in newspapers. The cartoon is made available to any newspaper that cares to run it, in exchange for a fee — often as many as 2,000 papers in 65 countries.

Now imagine that you published a web page about a particular topic and you wanted people who were interested in that topic to know about it. By listing the page as an item in your RSS file, you could have your page appear in front of people using RSS readers, called "news aggregators". RSS also encourages people to include links to your content within their own web pages. Bloggers are a huge core audience that especially does this.

What does RSS stand for?

The answer depends on who you ask. RSS as introduced by Netscape in 1999, then later abandoned in 2001, stood for "Rich Site Summary." Another version of RSS pioneered by UserLand Software stands for "Really Simple Syndication." In yet another version, RSS stands for "RDF Site Summary."

History buffs might be interested that there's been some rivalry over who invented RSS. This is why we have both different names and indeed different "flavors" or versions of RSS. Mark Pilgrim's written an excellent article, What Is RSS, that charts the different versions with recommendations on which to use. I'll also revisit the version choice you'll need to make. But first, let's look more closely at some basics of what goes into any RSS file.

How does RSS work?

Basically, you create a file that contains all your headlines, links and descriptions. You go to relevant news sites and submit your feed for approval. The sites will check your file for changes at a time scheduled by the individual sites. If the file has been updated then your updated headline(s) will be processed into the system.

A Basic RSS File

Each RSS file contains information about your website and your description, all surrounded by matching start and end tags. The information and its tags are called an "item." Your RSS file will have to include at least one item. Generally, items are web pages that you'd like others to link to. CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW TO WRITE THE CODE

Once you've created and validated your RSS text file, register it at the various aggregators, and watch the hits roll in. Any site can now grab and display your feed regularly, driving traffic your way. Whenever you update your RSS file, all the external sites that subscribe to your feed will be automatically updated. What could be easier?

RSS Feed Options

Everything shown above is the bare basics you need to create a file and start syndicating content from your website. However, there are options you could choose.

For example, rather than your entire website being a channel, you could actually have different content from within the website be defined into 'separate' channels. That's something we will explore in a future article, but some of the resources below will guide you through this, after this material becomes more familiar.

RSS 2.0 allows you to insert all types of additional information into your feed. It can be overwhelming to look at these and decide which to use. The easy answer is, don't concern yourself with anything you don't yet understand. Not every aggregator supports all the options offered. As long as you provide the minimum information suggested above, you should be fine.

Choosing The Right RSS Version

Earlier, we mentioned there are different versions of RSS. Even though you were entering the bare minimum of information, your file could easily be considered up to RSS 2.0 standards, the latest version promoted by UserLand and which is widely used.

The Syndic8 website reports that the most popular format of RSS by far is RSS 0.91 - and though we've demonstrated RSS 2.0, your file as shown is entirely compatible with RSS 0.91. In short, you've covered all the bases.

Saving Your RSS File

Now that you're done adding to the file, you need to save it. As long as the file is valid (more below), it doesn't matter what you call it. For this example, let's call it "yourpage.xml".

Once your file is saved, you can upload it to anywhere you want on your web server. Let's say you put it in the root or home directory. The address to your RSS file would be:

http://yourdomain.com/yourpage.xml

Validating The RSS File

Now that your RSS file is done, you need to validate it. Use a service aptly named 'Feed Validator'. Here are three: Feed Validator, UserLand, and Wytheville Community College News Center (we've found UserLand to be the most dependable URL). Simply enter the address to your RSS file, and you'll be told if everything is OK — or if there's something wrong you need to fix.

The service will also generate a JavaScript code that you can post on your site. Anyone copying the JavaScript can automatically have your feed syndicated into their pages — pretty neat!

Get Syndicated!

Now that your file is validated, you'll want the world to know about it! To make this happen, visit the RSS directories and search engines. They generally offer submission pages where you can inform them of your feed.

On Your Website

You also want to make sure people who come to your web site see that you provide a feed. It's very common to post a link to the feed somewhere on the home page of a web site. If you have a dedicated news page, you may want to put it there, as well.

You can link to your feed with an ordinary HTML link. However, many sites use a small orange XML icon to link to the feed. Some sites use blue RSS icon. There is no standard about using these.

Finally, it's good to "ping" one of the major services that track when web logs and RSS content changes. By doing this, you ensure that other sites that monitor these know to check back at your site for more content.

Weblogs.com is one of these major services (it's just been purchased by VeriSign). Enter your site's name and the URL of your feed into the manual Ping-Site Form, and it will know you've updated your feed. The Specs page explains how to set up automatic notification.

blo.gs is another major change monitoring site (just purchased by Yahoo!). It is used to receive the same information as Weblogs.com, so unless Yahoo changes that you shouldn't need to notify it separately. However, if you want to be on the safe side, it's easily done. Use the ping form, which also explains how to set up automatic pinging, as well.

Just the Beginning

Publishing your RSS feed is just the beginning. RSS can be used as a mini database containing headlines and descriptions of what's new on your site. It is perfect for layering on additional services. In addition to displaying your news on other sites and headline viewers, RSS data can flow into other products and services like PDA's, cell phones, email ticklers, voice updates and iPods.

Email newsletters can easily be automated with RSS. Affiliate networks and partners of like-minded sites can harvest each other's RSS feeds and automatically display the new stories from the other sites in the network, driving more traffic throughout.

RSS Aggregators

There are a number of RSS news aggregators out there that automatically suck up RSS files from content providers and present the news in a variety of ways. Some of these are: my.netscape.com, my.userland.com, and moreover.com. They make it easy to drop an RSS feed into your site. O'Reilly's new Meerkat Open News Wire service, shows what can be done with RSS and some clever code. Meerkat aggregates the currently available technical RSS feeds, and filters new stories by time, topic, keywords, and even regular expression. Narrowing the new stories down to your interests is a breeze, all entirely automated.

Everybody wins

RSS encourages multiple points of entry to one primary article, rather than multiple copies of the same article. And it appears that the sites with the most back-links win, and those with the freshest content also win. RSS creates a win-win situation. Once you have data in a standardized format, new forms of content distribution channels are only limited by your imagination, and scripting ability.