RSS is a useful online technology, that allows you to share, publish or track your website, other websites, with other users, and publish your content on other websites. It primarily allows other users to subscribe to a website, to receive new and updated content that is published, without having to revisit the website. Almost all major newspaper, and media websites offer subscription via RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or a simpler version, is Rich Site Summary.

So what is it exactly?

Think of RSS feeds as a pipe of information. Coming down the pope is alerts to new content. It could be just a summary of a new article for example. Dempending on the end users reader, the feed will be displayed differently. i.e. one reader might just publish a title, while others publish an extract of the article. Each reader is different, this is discussed later on in this article.

An example might be that you have created an RSS feed with title, body and image of your ten latest articles. A website developer, or owner who is interested in the content of what your site provides, might create content on his site, that publishes your feed, but they may only want to publish the title, so this in accordance can be customised, but limited to what content you have placed in your RSS feed in the first place. So in the end, the developer has content listing Titles of your articles, linking back to you website.

This is where the major benefit is, users are able to track what is happening on your website, live, and when they find something interesting, they are able to access and view your content that caught there attention.

It is cautioned not to publish your whole article, in an RSS feed, the feed is a 'teaser', to entice the subscribed, or browsing user into your site. If you allow a full article to be published via RSS, the user doesnt have to visit your site, or the developer is able to publish your full article, without having to link to your website to read the rest.

Online and Offline RSS Readers

Many users using online RSS readers to track there favourite websites and content, which of course, means they are able to view all there favourite feeds, from anywhere, as long as they have internet access. A couple of solutions include:

• Bloglines - www.bloglines.com
• Google Homepage - www.google.com/ig
• Google Reader - www.google.com/reader
• My Yahoo - my.yahoo.com

Offline Readers include

• Outlook 2007 built in RSS Reader
• RSS Bandit - www.rssbandit.org
• Firefox 3.5 - www.getfirefox.com

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