RSS for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Creating and Setting Up News and Other Content Feeds for Web Sites"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

RSS is a Web content syndication format. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. What that means is that it supplies content to a web site. For example, stock prices or news stories or sports scores.

RSS originated in 1999, developed to supply the My Netscape portal with external newsfeeds ("channels"). It has taken on a life of its own and has become perhaps the most popular XML format today.

Thousands of Web sites today use it as a "what's new" mechanism to drive traffic their way.

RSS has evolved into a popular means of sharing content between sites

Including the BBC, CNET, CNN, Disney, Forbes, Motley Fool, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Slashdot, ZDNet, and more. It can also be the basis for additional content distribution services. Once you have data in a standardized format, new forms of content distribution channels are only limited by your imagination, and scripting ability.

A number of news aggregators out there automatically suck up the files from content providers and present the news in a variety of ways (my.netscape.com, my.userland.com, xmltree.com, moreover.com). Many make it easy to drop a feed into your site, so you can supply the content to your site's visitors.

O'Reilly's new Meerkat Open News Wire service aggregates the currently available technical RSS feeds and filters the new stories by time, topic, keywords, and even regular expression.

RSS defines an XML grammar (a set of HTML-like tags) for sharing news. Each rss text file contains both static information about your site, plus dynamic information about your new stories, all surrounded by matching start and end tags. Ezines can easily be automated with it.

RSS is dialect of XML. All files must conform to the XML 1.0 specification, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website.

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