There are three different meanings of RSS, each corresponding to a different version of RSS. The most common meaning is Really Simple Syndication which is the meaning introduced by RSS version 2.0 (released in September 2002) and which is now the most commonly used version of RSS.
An RSS feed is a XML (Extensible Markup Language) file that resides on a web server and is accessible by URL and contains one or more items. RSS feeds are also called channels. You typically subscribe to a feed and read the feed using a RSS reader (also called an aggregator). The RSS reader automatically checks the feeds you are subscribed to on a regular basis (typically once an hour) to determine if there is any new content (new items)..
Blogs (also known as web logs) are online journals that are typically created using server-side software. Most of the sites that one can use to create a blog will automatically convert blog entries into RSS items.
Podcasts are recorded MP3 audio files usually disseminated over the internet. MP3 is a compression technology that is widely used on the internet; the file sizes of uncompressed audio files are much larger than the corresponding size of the MP3 file. Podcasts are based on RSS - the RSS file points to the URL of the audio file.
There are broadly three types of RSS readers:
There are a variety of ways to find feeds to subscribe to:
.
Sometimes there will be an icon for Atom which is a new format similar to
RSS. If you right click on this URL and select (in IE) Copy Shortcut, you
can then paste the URL of the XML file into your newsreader to subscribe.
(The screenshots and screenshots shown above were created with Snagit, a very useful tool for capturing part of a screen and then annotating it.)
If one clicks on arrow next to the orange icon indicating a feed has been detected, you will see a list of the feeds available from that page. By selecting one of them, you can add the feed to your list of feeds just like you would add a Favorite, and the list of feeds will display by clicking the star symbol at the far left for Favorites (click on the feeds tab).
RSS feeds are XML pages and therefore text files just like HTML files so they can be created or modified in Notepad or other text editors. However there are both online and desktop tools to make this process faster and easier. Since the various tools generally create a document only in one RSS format, which tool you choose may often depend on which format you wish to use. Because RSS 2.0 is the most popular, I will only mention those that create feeds in this format:
The feed (XML) file can be uploaded through FTP methods (an FTP client, a browser, or command line FTP), through a web-based uploader, and some desktop tools provide their own upload capability. IceRocket will host your feed for free or you can host it on your own website.
You can validate youir feed at http://feedvalidator.org
Blogger (www.blogger.com - Atom feeds), LiveJournal (www.livejournal.com - RSS 2.0 feeds), Bloglines (www.bloglines.com - RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds), and Yahoo (http://360.yahoo.com - RSS 2.0 feeds) are popular sites where one can create a blog and use this software to create a new item in your RSS feed every time you post to a blog.
Revised: November 8, 2006. Source of much of the above is Secrets of RSS by Steven Holzner, Peachpit Press, 2006. Comments to William Pegram, bill@billpegram.com