What does RSS mean?

Really Simple Syndication or its acronym RSS is a format which is used by online publishers such as news websites and weblogs to offer their content for syndication by online readers and other websites.

What is the benefit of using RSS?

Using RSS, webmasters can put the summary of the latest content at their websites which can be viewed through specialized software at other websites.

Many people are interested in other websites whose content changes unpredictably or without any schedule. Some of the examples of these websites may be news sites, weblogs, community or religious websites and product information websites. Suppose you are interested in 10 such websites and want to keep yourselves updated about the content changes at each of these sites. What will you do in this situation? You have no option other than checking each site if there is any new content or not.

Fortunately, this is not the case if you are using RSS. RSS is the better way to be notified of the latest content at each of the websites you are interested in (given that those websites are providing RSS).

How does RSS work?

RSS works in the following manner:

-> A website author maintains a list of notifications of the latest updates at his/her website in a standard format. The list of notifications is known as “RSS Feed” or “RSS Channels”.

-> People who are interested in the latest content can retrieve this list at their website through a specialized computer program, known as “RSS Reader” or “RSS Aggregator”.

Who is using RSS?

Producing RSS is very simple and most of the websites, especially the news sites, are using it as a tool to notify other people about the latest headlines. The number of websites offering RSS is growing at a rapid pace including some big names like Yahoo News and Amazon.com.


What does RSS look like?

RSS Feed is a XML based format and its look depends upon the version you are using but the basic structure remains almost the same.

For example, following is a sample RSS 2.0 feed:

http://www.merinews.com/rss/rss1.xml


RSS Reader/Aggregator Programs

You can view a “RSS Reader” as just a browser of a “RSS Feed”. RSS Reader automatically tracks the changes at multiple websites and presents them in a simple and useful manner.