|
RSS Technology
What is RSS?
The internet today contains a wealth of information. Avid internet users visit
many interesting websites and read many articles. Information and web pages
make their way into the favorite folder for later viewing. In the course of
time, re-visiting these bookmarks becomes a major task for users especially when
the number of bookmarks grows. A better technique for users is to receive
information about updates to their favorite websites automatically.
Many websites have realized this problem and have started providing information
in a common format. RSS is a web content syndication format. It is a
lightweight XML format designed for syndicating information. Although RSS
was initially conceived as a format for syndicating news, pretty much anything that
can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS.
Many websites publish content, which they would like to share with others.
RSS provides a way for websites to distribute their content outside of a web browser.
RSS is an easy way to keep you automatically up to date on websites you like to
visit regularly. RSS files do not have a common file extension, although they
frequently end in one of .XML, .RSS, or .RDF (note that other extensions may also
be used).
How to read RSS feeds?
Internet users can use special software like newsreaders and RSS-aggregators to
organize RSS feeds and get automatic updates. A Product like Active Web Reader
allows you to read RSS files. Active Web Reader in fact goes beyond simply
reading RSS content. It can also organize RSS feeds, manage updates, monitor
for website changes and search for information online. It keeps you automatically
updated on the latest changes by checking RSS feeds and displaying items from them.
RSS aggregators are set up to check for updates periodically in the feeds you subscribe,
commonly once every day. In other words, the information comes to you, rather
than you having to go to the websites yourself. This saves a tremendous amount
of time. Conversely, you can read many more feeds in the same amount of time.
Many people read several hundred feeds. That just would not be feasible without
an RSS aggregator. Additionally, you avoid all the non-new information on
a web page, including the ads, menus, etc.
How to find RSS feeds?
Go to the website whose RSS feed you are looking for, if it has one, then it probably
includes a link to it. Try looking on the page’s menu (usually left side or
right side) and the footer. Most often websites advertise RSS feeds with small
icons. The most common is an XML icon like this
, but there are a number of variations
on the labels (RSS, RSS2, XML, RDF, Atom), color, and size, such as
and
. Other times there may not be
an image, but text with one of those labels, or a link labeled “Syndicate this site”.
RSS readers like Active Web Reader also provide a way to find RSS feeds automatically
while browsing web pages through a feature called RSS Auto Discovery. They
provide a direct method to select discovered feeds and organizing them.
|