RSS Feeds

RSS the most familiar abbreviation used by almost all bloggers, webmasters, News Providers and readers. This article presents our readers a breif introduction about Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication  (RSS)

*Syndication = publish or broadcast simultaneously in a number of media (taken from www.askoxford.com)

RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like news.google.com, technology blogs like www.labnol.org  and personal weblogs. 

But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, the profile updates of your friends on Orkut, newly posted articles on blogs(e.g. www.blog.TechYoddha.com) and even the revision history of a book.

Why Should one have feeds?

• It increases traffic to your site.
  
• It builds brand awareness for your site.
• It can help with search engine rankings.
• It helps cement relationships within a community of sites.
• It improves the site/user relationship.
• With additional technologies, it allows others to give additional features to your serviceupdate-notification via instant messaging, for example.
• It makes the Internet an altogether richer place, pushing semantic technology along and encouraging reuse. Good things happen when you share your data.
• It gives you a good excuse to play with some cool stuff. {like i did by having a personal channel of feeds :-) }
• By reducing the amount of screen-scraping of your site, it saves wasted bandwidth.

Creation of RSS:

It is just an XML file that you should have for creating an RSS feed.

Else everything is the beauty of the Feed Reader that you have viz. on Mobile, in Browsers, desktop application to read RSS feeds etc.

Steps:

1. Create a valid XML file with .xml extension
2. host it at some server e.g.  your public_html directory of your domain website
3. access the file with a Feed Reader ( e.g. www.TechYoddha.com/ty.xml)

There are other 100s of RSS providers available to create your RSS feeds automatically for your blog posts (e.g FeedBurner, FeedBlitz etc.)

Contents of XML file:

1. xml tag
2. rss tag
3. channel tag
4. title tag
5. link tag
6. description tag
7. item tag
8. title tag
9. link tag
10. description tag

Sample Feeds:

1. http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/rssnat.asp
   
2. http://www.hindu.com/rss/nushdline.xml
   
3. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TechYoddha
   

References:

• www.xml.com
• www.feedzilla.com
• A book by Ben Hammersley " Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom "