blogging 102 | RSS – What The Hell IS IT?

Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes

I am surprised these days how many people still don’t know what an RSS/XML/Atom feed is. Almost every website be it a blog or anything else has some variation of that nice little orange symbol that looks like this:

Okay now that you all know what those are, the question some of you still have is yeah, but what do they do. First lets explain RSS. In the guise of K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid) RSS is Really Simple Syndication. As my MIL (mother in law- in case you are really knew to acronyms) would say RSS and Atom are the same meat, just different gravy. They are syndicated feeds of blog posts. XML is just the technology that both of those things are built on.

So what is syndication? I knew you were going to ask that. Simply put, it is anything you subscribe to, just like television stations get reruns of shows or newspapers buy advice columns, but web syndication is free. You click on the link and add to any number of web based readers like Google or into your favorite reader program. I personally like MS Outlook for this since it is what I read my email from several a dozen different sources, have my daily calendar and so on and so forth. So the question is why would you want to subscribe to a feed when I could just go to the website. The answer is pretty simple time. You are already opening a program or going to a single site for your email, so adding one more thing to check saves you time. If you are a voracious feed reader like me, I can quickly check to see if over a hundred blogs I read have new posts in just a few minutes. I can decide if I want to go and comment read the full article if it wasn’t posted in the feed, or just skip on by. I literally save several hours a day by using a feed reader.

So which is the best method to use a program or a website? That is really a personal things. For me it is a program, because that is how I check my email and it is open all the time. If you are on the go and want to check it from any number of computers or cell phones, then a website reader is probably better. Can you use both? Sure, though if you check as many as I do regularly you would probably only want a small list in for going mobile.

That is the long and short of it. Syndicated feeds are good for people who surf blogs, which means as bloggers you should learn to make the most use of them. Secondly you can get a feed of comments posted to your blog which is extremely helpful for bloggers who want to respond to comments on their blogs.

A new feature for me is a link to another great blog post about blogging. Today’s goes to, Sara at the Pajama Professional with How to Develop Mad Skills and Market Insight