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Introduction to RSS

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Website design, and the way it is programmed has been evolving over the years to accommodate the advances in technology, software, and internet speeds. One thing to come out of this is the separation of content and design. If you look at a modern website and the way it is coded you will see that the content is contained in blocks that define what content is in that block. Then using CSS, the designer will apply a design and style to the content and the blocks that contain the content. I go into more detail of the benefits of using this model in my article Why use CSS?. One technology to come out of this new way of programming is RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

RSS on the most basic level is a file on the website that only contains the content and is standardized in the way it names the content blocks and what content is provided. This way every website using RSS will have the title of the article in a block named “title”, the categories in blocks named “category”, and so on. This provides the ability to have applications that take this content and show it to you in a consistent way no matter what website it came from.

That isn’t the biggest advantage to using RSS though. The main reason people use RSS is that their RSS application will notify them when there is a new article posted. The type of notification they recieve is their choice. Add that to the consistent interface browsing across multiple websites and it greatly increases the amount of sites you can read in one sitting and removes the annoyance of not knowing if a site has anything new or not.

What programs are out there that have RSS support? The most unobtrusive way to use RSS is to have it integrated into your web browser. Internet Explorer 7 and newer, Firefox, Safari, and Flock are a few of the web browsers that have integrated RSS support that you may not have used before. There are also standalone applications for reading RSS feeds. FeedDemon for Windows and NetNewsWire for Mac are great examples of standalone RSS readers. My personal favorite is Google Reader. Google Reader is a website that allows you to add your RSS feeds just like a standalone RSS reader, but add the functionality of being able to access and update your feeds on any computer that has internet. Each option has it’s ups and downs and is worth checking out to find what your personal preference is.