RSS

My wife asked how RSS works, and I said that while I kind-of knew, I didn't really. I did some searching, and all of the explanations I found were badly written or excited about using it, but not explaining how it works. So, this is how it works. I think so, anyway.

RSS (the acronym stands for Really Simple Syndication, among other things; that's not important) is a way to get a summary of what's on a web site without having to go to the site.

To use RSS, you need two things: the site's 'RSS Feed', and the second is an 'RSS Reader'. The RSS Feed is a file that contains summary of all of the material on the site. This file and the summary are created and maintained by the site owner. The file changes whenever what's on the site changes. The RSS reader is a program that displays the contents of that file.

When you find a site that you want to monitor with an RSS reader, you need to get the URL of the site's RSS Feed. This isn't the same as the URL of the site itself.

Note that not all sites support RSS. For the ones that do, you can usually find the the feed URL by clicking on the 'RSS' indicator in the address bar when you've got the site displayed in your browser. The 'RSS indicator' looks like this -

You take the URL for the site's RSS feed and put it into your RSS Reader. (For some readers, this happens automatically; for others, like Google Reader, you have to cut-and-paste it.) Most readers can 'auto-discover' the feed's URL if you give them the URL of the site.


Each time you start your RSS reader, it goes to the URL for the site's RSS feed, gets a current copy of the feed, brings it back to your reader, and displays it. If the information in the summary is all of the new material, that's all you need to do; if it's just a summary, or just the first couple of words, you can click on it to go to the site where it was created and read the rest of it.