sablescort said:
Care to give us a crash course on RSS?
But let me get this ....isn't RSS related to the blogging software ur using or wot? Enlighten me and others will ya?
I'm late to the party.. as usual. =)
Lets see if i can explain and demonstrate RSS well..
RSS is all about SYNDICATION. Which means "hey, i have something here, let's share it so other people can read it elsewhere". RSS just hands out a really basic list of html code that gives a summary with a link to the main site for more detail. Specifically, this provides 'headlines', for when a site is updated.
There's a couple of main ways that RSS can be used, but the most common are through a newsreader, or linked from another website.
With a newsreader, you collect different 'feeds' from various sites, and skim through the headlines. Just click on the links provided, and read the actual articles if you want to. The newsreader will check the sites every so often and let you know if there are any new articles.
I barely ever browse the web these days, except by using my newsreader.
And yes, it is used for blogs quite often. But it also is used in many other types of sites. (sample rss feeds I have: ABC news, BBC news, slashdot, deaftoday, Liberty meadows comic, google alerts, dealmac, macrumors, versiontracker, and some deafie blogs)
From a website you can list different feeds, and actually post the feeds up so people can read them. Blogs usually don't have this.. you more often see it in CMS. This is useful if you want to provide quick links for pages related to your content. (ie, a Deafie site with feeds for deafie blogs or news)
A weakness with RSS that there are SEVERAL different competing and conflicting standards. RSS 0.91 and 1.0 and 2.0 are actually different 'standards', not different versions. There is also atom, a newer type of feed. Then there's also different ways to name it, RSS, or RDF, or XML or atom. If your head is still spinning, but you want a bit more explanation, the best place that I've seen that reasonably explains everything is at
FaganFinder