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 "

3g / GPRS / EDGE

:-) -I have a 3G phone !!
:-I -They have an EDGE phone !!
:-( -You have a GPRS phone !!

These days everyone is conversing like above; and in INDIA even if these terms are not technically meant to people but everybody is aware that these two technologies influence the choices of their mobile phone. Lets know about these technologies in brief.

Both are the telecommunication technologies to transfer data.

3G: from wikipedia :: is the third generation of mobile phone standards and technology, superseding 2G, and preceding 4G.
3G technologies enable network operators to offer users a wider range of more advanced services while achieving greater network capacity through improved spectral efficiency. It is often suggested by industry sources that 3G can be expected to provide 384 kbit/s at or below pedestrian speeds, but only 128 kbit/s in a moving car.

GPRS: from wikipedia :: General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a packet oriented Mobile Data Service available to users of Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM). It provides data rates from 56 up to 114 kbit/s.

There is one more technology that is talked about many times with 3G is EDGE.

EDGE: from wikipedia :: Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution (EDGE), Enhanced GPRS (EGPRS) is a digital mobile phone technology that allows increased data transmission rates and improved data transmission reliability. It comes somewhere between 2G and 3G techonologies of data transfer and communication.