What is RSS Feeds

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a way to subscribe to a source of information, and the sources are called feeds. When you subscribe you will get a feed. It is a useful tool for keeping updated on your favourite blogs or websites. It delivers feed (often a series of headlines and brief summaries of articles published) from websites or blogs to people. The content will be delivered via a web portal, news reader (such as Google Reader, etc) or in email. Feeds also make it possible for your site content to be packaged into gadgets, widgets, mobile devices and other technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, news, weather or any other headlines just about anywhere. In a reality life, feeds are just like newspapers. A newspaper company sharing their news, stories, articles or whatever you want to call it, to all their customers by distributing newspaper. If you get your newspaper on your working desk or in the living room every morning, in internet you'll get your feed via email, news reader or web portal. So in internet world feeds are newspaper, you get your feeds by subscribing to your favorite websites.

Some web-browsing software will automatically detect RSS feeds. Opera and Firefox browsers display the square orange badge for a web feed in the address bar when they find RSS feeds on a site. In internet explorer, the symbol will appear in the toolbar and for Safari, you will get a blue rectangle with “RSS” written in white letters.

Reading feeds requires something that can read and aggregate RSS files. Aggrregators collect and interpret RSS feeds in one location. Today there are more than 2,000 different news aggregators. RSS and a normal website have one thing in common, they both are simple text files on webserver. RSS uses www Consortium’s Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a guide to tell aggregators on how to read the file and RDF is based on extensible markup language (XML). RSS XML tags tell the aggregator how to display the feed on your screen. Many common blogging tools like Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type and Vox have the ability to syndicate your weblog in RSS, so you dont need to know how to write code. These weblog programs has everything needed to publish a feed: the title, address, meta and other important information are all included for you. Of course, other organizations or websites who choose to publish with their propriety systems have to build RSS into their web code. You can do this too, if you know how to write a programming language.

Aggregators and RSS feeds are also sometimes called RSS Readers and RSS channels. FeedBurner is the most used RSS feed service at this time and it is owned by Google. Creating an RSS feed is very simple and easy, many websites now provide this feature to improve their SEO. The more subscribers you have, the more backlinks you will get and therefore the better SEO it will be for your sites.