Can someone explain

[rmthunter]

in educated layman's terms, RSS feeds and whether I should have one on my blog?

[rdt21]

rmthunter said

in educated layman's terms, RSS feeds and whether I should have one on my blog?

RSS feeds contain excerpts of your most recent weblog posts and they are a nice convenience for your readers who use a program called an aggregator (http://www.bloglines.com/ is an example). Aggregators help people save time by telling them when you have posted something new to your weblog. It is much easier to keep track of dozens of weblogs this way rather than repeatedly visiting each one to see if there is any new content.

Most weblog software automatically generates an RSS feed and keeps it updated so your weblog may have already have one with a filename like index.xml or atom.xml (Atom is similar to RSS but performs the same function). If you can't find one of those files in the main directory of your weblog then check the documentation to see how to turn that feature on.

[pippadaisy[$]]

An RSS feed is an XML output of your text that people can subscribe to. That way, they know when you've updated your blog.

There are any number of RSS readers out there... I use an extension for Firefox. It alerts me any time someone on my list of subscriptions updates; kind of like a "new mail" alert. You can then either read the entry in your reader or go directly to the blog to read it, depending on how you set it up.

So yes, you want an RSS feed on your blog.

[CurtisEdmonds]

You can look at the RSS code for my blog:

http://www.txreviews.com/blog/?feed=rss2

Doesn't look like anything you'd want to read, but if you put that into an RSS reader (the Google home page will allow you to do this, so will My Yahoo, just to name the two most popular) it'll come up with the most recent postings.

[roscoe]

For folks using Firefox (or another browser than Internet Explorer 6 or lower) RSS feeds can be added to the bookmarks or favorites directory, and one can see the latest "articles", "blog entries" or "posts" via a slideout menu.

It's handy to check if a site has updated their content since your last visit rather than loading the page, and in some cases will take you directly to what you want to read instead of link hunting on a page.

RSS is another content delivery method that is free, flexible and fast. IE7 will have support for it, so I would advise you make use of it now.

[drmomentum[$]]

The "usual" way that people read your blog is by visiting your webpage with their browser. Your pages (in HTML) are read by their browser and turned into something pretty and readable.

An RSS feed and an Atom feed are just another type of file format to present your content. Like HTML, these files are not very human readable. But instead of using a web browser to read them, some other program reads them. This program is called an "aggregator."

Unlike your web browser, the aggregator's sole purpose is not just to interpret markups in the file to make the content look pretty. Instead, the aggregator does a number of things:

1. It may grab content from a number of sources, not just your website.
2. It checks the site periodically to see if the content has updated for the purpose of notifying the reader.
3. It allows the reader to arrange the content in ways that suit their reading habits rather than the preference of the content author.

So you see, the focus here is on:

1. Content
2. and Reader Preferences

As a content creator, the details of the aggregator may not be of much interest to you (unless you want to start using an aggregator for your own blog-and-other-news surfing). You don't have to care how they work. But you might be interested.

Some aggreagtors work together with web browsers (Google's homepage, My Yahoo, and especially Bloglines). As an example, take a look at this:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/drmomentum

This gives you access to many of the blog content that I read regularly. You can see how Bloglines allowed me to organize them. I can read all these blogs withoput leaving bloglines, because bloglines has cached the content and displays it for me. This is the public view of my bloglines feeds. In my personal view, Bloglines is keeping track of which stories I have read (or marked as read) so that I can quickly see the new stories on my favorite blogs.

This is just an example of one content consumer's use of RSS feeds. Some people use aggregators that do not use a web browser. One great example of this is people who go for periods without a net conneciton (lets say they disconnect their laptop and have no access to wireless.)

That person might run a client that aggregates content from a number of blogs and stores it on the laptop. The user can then read the stories on the bus or wherever. Next time he has net access, the aggregator goes back out to grab more news.

AS A CONTENT CREATOR you will be concerned about how to create your RSS feed. It's just a file, but it is an XML file and therefore has its own special formatting. If you create your site by hand, RSS feeds will be a pain for you. Probably not nearly worth the effort. If you use some sort of blog publishing software, you're in luck, since most blogging platforms will generate an RSS or Atom file for you. ANd they'll update it every time you post. Now it really becomes useful, and invisible to you.

You don't need to be limited to an RSS feed of your posts. I have an RSS feed for the comments that my readers post to my blog, in case any of my readers want to "subscribe" to the user comments in their aggregator.

AS A CONTENT CREATOR, you might be thinking about how much content to include in your RSS feed. SOme people only publish excerpts because they want people to be drawn to their website to read the whole story. I disaggree with the practice of only publishing excerpts, and favor the publication of all of your content in the RSS feed for 2 reasons:

1. I find that I often visit my favorite blogs ANYWAY, -- I don't need to be forced to do it because I've only been offered a little bit of each post.
2. I find excerpts very annoying because they often are not representative of the post, or are arbitrarily short.
3. People who do want to read your content offline get stuck with an excerpt and no way to read the entire entry until they get back to a connection. It may frustrate them enough that they just say "forget it -- I'll read some other blog."

So I would recommend publishing your full content in RSS. I publish separate feeds for excerpts and full content, in case someone out there wants just the excerpts.

I hope this has been helpful and thorough.