Ajay's Blog

RSS is a acronym formed of three words that are Really Simple Syndication. Actually this is the mostly used for RSS, others include Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or a variation of those. It was build up as a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites but at present it is not only used for conveying news over the web, pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated using really simple syndication method.

RSS is a text based format mostly used with XML.  RSS are also called RSS feeds or channels. It simply contains items that are to be conveyed over the internet. Once the information or data about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-reader program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way for what they are developed. We can describe it as it is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works.

Why RSS ?

Websites the content of which is changed in unpredictable manner are to be watched regularly by the website users, for example weblogs, news sites, religious sites come under this category the content of which is regularly changing. Repeatedly checking each website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious for website users. The previous solution of this problem was e-mail notification to subscribers but if failed as users get hundreds of messages and they got disorganized in their inbox. So another way of syndication was required for users that appeared with the name RSS.

It solves the problem of users that need regular updated information of any website.

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How does RSS work?

RSS can’t do anything by itself as it is a feed in XML format if you open it in a browser you will see XML code that is hardly readable by most of the users. Special softwares are developed for this purpose and these are known as aggregators. RSS-Aggregators are sometimes called rss-feed readers or rss channels. If you are interested in updates of any website and want to be a regular user of that you just need to subscribe the feed of website of your interest. You can catch content of multiple website on a single web page and the visitors may be interested in using that content.

Generating an RSS feed of a website is very simple and thousands of websites are now providing this feature. This have now become a necessity of  major news organizations and weblogs.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Terminology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.