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RSS Feeds - What they are and how you can use them
By Mike | August 5, 2008
RSS is probably one of the most confused areas for people starting to blog. Everyone has heard the term either RSS, feed or the two combined RSS feed. Quite a few though don’t understand them or the power that having a feed gives you when using a blog.
Lets start with a definition from Wikipedia of RSS.
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format.[2] An RSS document (which is called a “feed,” “web feed,”[3] or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.[3]
The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of content from multiple web sources in one place. RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader,” “feed reader,” or an “aggregator,” which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.
I am not going to cover the technical aspects of the various modes. For most it is only important to understand how they work and what they can do for you. It is a transmission that is sent automatically when you update that others can subscribe to through a feed reader. This allows people to see in one place all of the new items from various sources that they wish to use.
Here are just a few of the more popular feed readers and is far from being an inclusive list.
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Google reader
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My Yahoo
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My MSN
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My AOL
All of these will allow you to get the latest information on any RSS feed you may want to keep track of easily.
Most blogs will either have little icons that list various readers like My Yahoo, My MSN, etc (like you will find in the sidebar of this blog) or you will see the image that is shown to the left. If you click on them they will give you the necessary information to add the feed to your reader.
A feed can also be used to trigger an email alert to those that have subscribed. There are a few different services that will do this. We will cover two of the more popular here.
The first is feed burner. Go to Feedburner and create your feed with them. Then click publicize and select email subscriptions. Then you can create the feed and they will give you the HTML to add the form to your site.
This is good if you are using Feedburner for your stats. This is important if you are selling advertising based on the subscriber stats. Because I don’t sell advertising on my blogs this is not important for me.
The other option is to use an autoresponder and I recommend AWeber. They will allow you to automate and send an update each time you add a new post to your blog.
This is easy to do by just creating a new list and then click on the messages - blog broadcast button. You will then add in your feed and edit the template to send each time that you post your blog.
The big advantage to using a service like AWeber is that you can send other messages to this list besides just your blog updates. You can also use the automation to deliver an e-course or other series as your gift for subscribing which you can’t do with the Feedburner option.
This should give you a better concept of the power of RSS, what a feed is and how it can benefit you but…
If you have questions or comments they are always welcomed here.
Mike Paetzold
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Topics: Updates | We do follow trackback
August 5th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Greetings Mike…hey, ever since I upgraded to the latest WordPress version, I get this message every time I try to up grade one of my plug-ins or to download an article…”Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class snoopy in /home/wowolf/public_html/wordpress/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 47″ What would be your recomendations.