What is RSS | And how it's work |
how do RSS feeds work |first what is RSS
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication it's a file format if you will it's not really designed for people to read it's designed for programs to pass data around about what kind of content is on your site what's new etc think of RSS like the on-screen guide for your cable or satellite TV service the on-screen guide lists a channel and its description and what programs are coming up on that channel and their descriptions well an RSS file format has two levels of organization at the top is a channel with its name and description only this isn't the name and description of a TV channel is the name and description of your website or blog the second level of organization under channel isn't programmed like in our TV Guide but item items have information about each of the recent stories or blog posts on your site the information on each item includes its name description publication date a link to the story and so on if you want to dig into it the RSS feed actually looks a lot like HTML it's text surrounded by tags only instead of page structure tags in HTML like nav section footer article and so on there are tags for Channel item title description link and so on it's done in a standard that was inspired by HTML called XML which is used to structure data other than web pages there is also a standard similar to RSS called atom that instead of consisting of a channel with items it has a feed with entries it's still kind of the same thing what kind of sites generate RSS well just about everything blogs forums news sites like the BBC CNN and so on every podcast generates an RSS feed meetup.com hands out upcoming meeting notices via RSS you can get a list of your delicious bookmarks in RSS the Magento e-commerce platform provides the store owner with an RSS feed of items they're running low on categories on Craigslist have RSS feeds YouTube Google Calendar and reddit generate atom feeds there are millions of RSS feeds available to you on the Internet so what can you do with them you can drive your browser's bookmarks with them Firefox generally has a latest news bookmark that pulls the RSS feed from the BBC you can put feeds into an RSS reader like feedly and make your own News dashboard of your favorite sources you can display them on your website as maybe a sidebar widget showing the latest stories from a related site or blog you can set up programs like HootSuite or buffer to take items from your site's RSS feed and post them to your social media accounts you can use automation sites like IFTTT or is appier to take RSS items and send them to Dropbox spreadsheet or to your phone via SMS you can have them automatically post to WordPress or blogger MailChimp can take your recent RSS items and send them out as a newsletter to your subscribers look at this diagram and you can start to get an idea of all the possibilities out there it's a lot more exciting than just reading the news it's one of the underlying layers of plumbing on the web I hope you've enjoyed
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