RSS Feeds. A Simple Explanation
I don’t like the computer jargon and acronyms. They make things that are really not that complicated seem that way. Sure, some things like COBOL, they’re complicated. There’s no reason for a person to see the word COBOL and get excited. It’s a 50 year old computer language that’s miserable, so who cares?
RSS isn’t like that. This is more exciting than “Blue Ray“, DVD, IPAD, or IPOD combined. What RSS does is allow you to pull in “feeds” from websites. A “feed” is something that occurs every time a post is made. It’s a little excerpt of the post that can be sent out to millions of “readers” every time a new post is made.
For example, I’m going to make this post on my website, and because I’ve done the work, it’s going to go out to thousands of readers that have chosen to accept my “feed”. You can have your own reader to take in these feeds. Some of the most popular readers are
There are more and a Google search for “RSS reader” will find them for you. I use Google Reader because it’s simple enough and works with my e-mail. It’s not the best, just handy and good enough.
The benefit is that you can take all of the feeds from websites you like and put them in a reader. At a quick glance, you can see all of the new posts. It eliminates taking the time to go to the website looking for a new post. It also gives you the title and preview before you decide if you would like to go to the website. In short, content comes to you instead of you going to it.
As you’ll see in the video, the most difficult part is getting the feed address. Most often, right clicking the link and using “copy link location” is the best way to get the address of the feed. Many are simple. For example, markspearman.com’s feed is http://markspearman.com/feed. You just place /feed on the end of the address.
A nice feature in Google Reader is that you can save searches as RSS feeds. For example, if you do a search in Google’s Blog search, scroll to the bottom and you’ll see that you can save this search to Google reader. Everytime a new blog post from any blog comes out about your search, it will be stored in reader. It’s a nice way to compile information on a subject.
Here’s a movie that explains RSS a little better.
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