Technically Speaking…

Lately I have been asked a few times what RSS is and to provide some examples of how it works. There has been an article posted here previously, but given the length of time between then and now I thought maybe a newer post might be in order.

The original post is here.

RSS or Really Simple Syndication allows publishers large and small to get content to their readers in a much faster fashion. The person reading the blog or website will subscribe to the sites RSS feed using an aggregator, as new items are added to the site, these will be pushed to the subscribers and appear in their feed readers as items are added.

The benefit to the blog or site publishing the feed is that the readers who wish to be kept up on what is going on receive the updates regularly. Also the site’s feed will not require an email subscription (although this is possible) and can avoid being caught in any spam filters that may be configured.

The benefit to the reader is time. Subscribing to a website’s RSS feed will allow the posted updates to be retrieved as they are posted. Reducing the amount of time that the reader spends visiting websites or trying to remember where they read that interesting tip on how to make paste (or something else).

How is an RSS feed created?

An RSS feed can be created in a couple of ways. Many blogging applications create a feed of the posts and/or comments automatically and allow the editor to make these available to readers. This makes feed generation immediate and requires no extra work on the part of the author.

Another way that a feed can be created is through a third party service, some of these will generate a feed based on any content, no matter the platform that actually publishes the information. A great reason to allow your feed to be managed by a third party application is that there is no maintenance and also there is likely to be a much more manageable URL for the feed than http://www.myblog.com/posts/feed.xml.

I understand that a feed will save time and spam, but why use it if another application is required to read RSS feeds?

An RSS feed is simply an aggregate collection of updates made to a website that is published to anyone who subscribes to it. Several software vendors have created applications which can process the XML based feed into something that a subscriber can read.

Since feeds are XML based, the application needs to make these files presentable, this is the reason an aggregator is needed. The aggregator simply formats and sorts the different XML files that are added to it. A feed will be displayed with a title and a summary. Each update is separated into its title and information, making the posts easy to read.

Some popular aggregators are:

NewsGator Online - an online based reader and account for storing and reading subscriptions

FeedDemon - a Windows desktop based reader published by NewsGator that integrates with a NewsGator online account.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 - Microsoft has Integrated Feed aggregation into the latest version of Outlook

Google Reader - An online based reader that allows users to share feeds with others and post notes about items they have read

There are many other options for reading feeds, but these are a few of the most popular and outside of Outlook they are free to use.

Now that I can get to and read feeds what else do they do for my website?

Techhelp uses a third party service provided by Google called FeedBurner. Feedburner creates a feed based on the provided URL. It also allows authors to track stats, like subscribers and views per day. Keeping track of your subscribers helps you keep an eye on the popularity of the feed you are publishing.

Feedburner also allows additional links to be inserted into both the website post and the feed post which will allow the reader to submit the post to other web services such as Digg or Del.ici.ous making it easier for them to share items they are reading with others, resulting in even more traffic for publishers. This type of exposure can generate a great deal more page views and subscribers long term simply by exposing the content to more people.

Tracking the stats of feeds will also allow a site operator to see just how much the readers are growing and even which reader they use to access a feed this can be helpful in determining if the content being published into a feed is effective. As new content is published, if subscriptions increase or decrease dramatically, it may be an indication of the effectiveness of the content being published.

Note: Techhelp does not receive any perks from Google for mentioning Feedburner. This is purely the service that is used with this blog, so it is the one we know the most about.

In addition to all of the great feed information shown to subscribers and made available as part of the feed, the status of a sites feed can be monitored. When the feed is down, a separate feed (available to the publisher) will be updated to allow tracking of a given feed.

Bottom Line: Maintaining a feed for posts on your website makes tracking readership easier for authors/editors and makes keeping up with your updates an automatic thing for your readers.  This is a win/win for all involved.  I have also found that once you get started with feeds, it is very easy and tempting to read alot more blogs than one might think in a day.

Many web applications besides blogs and news sites publish feeds or have an Application Programming Interface (API) that allows a thrid party to create an aggregate feed of content from a given application as well.  Some of the more popular applications either posting a feed or being aggregated into a feed are:

Flickr - Photo sharing site aquired by Yahoo!

FriendFeed - newly popular social aggregation site.  This site pulls in account info from many different social networking sites and pushes them out as a feed.

TwitterFeed - push your blog’s feed to twitter

Remember the Milk - an online task service that publishes a feed of your tasks

There are many other applications on the Internet that will begin making use of RSS or other feed driven technologies and formats.   We here at TechHelp love us some RSS and will post here about it as new things we think you might find useful pop up.

Hopefully this post has got you thinking about RSS and some of the things it can help you accomplish.  In a future post Techhelp will take a look at a couple of the aggregator applications out there for use with RSS feeds and the pros and cons of these.

FeedDemon, News, Office, RSS blogging, feeds, RSS, web sites

In todays fastmoving, over busy society many people do not want to take the time to read the news. Sure it is available in many formats from print to television to radio to the newest of the available choices, the Internet.

Many sites have sprung up to provide news, Fox News, CNN, and the other major and even local news companies. Portal sites like Yahoo, MSN, and Google have also come up with ways to bring you as much news as you might need everyday. This technology is great, I for one would rather read the relevant news on the Internet than sit in front of the television or pay to get the newspaper every morning.

What if there were a way to bring all of the news from the websites you visit everyday into one place where you could read them all at once? How easy would that make things?

The way this is done is through a web protocol called RSS or Really Simple Syndication. When content to be syndicated is produced, an rss file or feed is produced. This feed is kept in a file separate from the original URL. This file uses a formatting language to organize information into titles and brief descriptions. Similar to what you might see on a news site. The Internet users who wish to read this content then subscribe to the contents feed.

When you subscribe to a feed, your web portal or desktop reader will check in with the feed at specified intervals for new content, when the feed is updated… presto, you have new things to read. No surfing, searching, or extended browsing required.

Sites such as the one you are reading now, known as webblogs, can also publish RSS feeds. The software used to create the content for the webpage also creates its RSS feed. You can subscribe to the feed for this site and other weblogs just like other news sites.

Sites are denoted as having a feed have a link to that feed, usually displayed by an orange RSS icon like this .

A feeds file contains a snippet of information about the article, or can contain the entire item depending on the publisher. The content is formatted in a human readable and very loose way, keep in mind when you look at the actual feed file in your browser you will probably send email telling me that it isnt very readable. So we will spare the boring technical graphic (for now).

When feeds are pulled in by Yahoo’s News reader (available through my.yahoo.com with a free account) they are displayed as shown below:

There is a company out on the Internet that gets RSS and aggregation, aggregation is the buzzword used by many to describe the process of pulling in content from various sources. The company is called NewsGator. They have an online reader, much like the yahoo reader, but focused on RSS and in my opinion easier to use. That reader is shown below:

And for those of you who like an application outside your browser to investigate this technology, Newsgator produces a few desktop applications for reading the news. There is Feed Demon for Windows and Net News Wire for the Macintosh. These applications have free trial periods of 30 days and a cost of $29.95 following the trial period (clicking on the name of the app above will download the trial to your PC). They also have tutorials that go past the scope of this article.

A Feed Demon screenshot is shown below:

Now that I have opened up the idea of RSS and News readers I hope you will look at this new technology. When you first begin playing with the applications or protocols there may be some questions as to where to find feeds… in truth, google, yahoo, and other searches would provide many results however there are a few search engines just for this type of thing. One of these is www.icerocket.com. You can search the web, blogs, myspace.com and other things.

Note: Feed Demon and the NewsGator online reader will let you search for feeds on a specific topic if you do not know the address of the feed.

So we have looked at what RSS is and a little about how it works, but what can it do for you?  RSS being a way to distribute content to virtually anywhere can do many things, I will do my best to provide some business and fun examples of RSS to show you ways that you might find it useful.

In addition to my.yahoo.com, the fine folks over at Yahoo! have released Yahoo! Widgets, a desktop applicaion that can connect to the internet and retrieve various pieces of Information using a english friendly language (RSS) and a little javascript.  The widget application, called an engine, loads individual javascript applets which access RSS feeds to provide information to your desktop.  For example, suppose you wanted to park the weather for your community on your desktop.  You could use a widget called Yahoo! Weather, which loads with the engine by default.  When you launch the widget for the first time, it will ask you for a zip code.  Filling in the zip code for Chilton WI I get todays weather, shown below as it looks in the weather widget.

You can also get other things via widgets, like stock tickers, news, and even online radio streams.  The widget engine is a free download from widgets.yahoo.com. Once installed you can browse the widget gallery to find other things that might be interesting to you.  Installation of new items is a snap, once the engine is installed, simply choose the widget you want and tell your Internet Browser to open it using Yahoo Widget Engine.  If the item needs any settings changed, area code, zip code and the like, you will be asked for it when the widget starts.  As an example, a portion of the widget gallery is listed below:

 

As you can see, RSS is taking off quite rapidly and its possibilities are endless. 
To get you started, this article and all others posted at Technically Speaking… are available via RSS feed. Simply copy and paste this link

feed:http://techhelp.cybercreations.net/?feed=rss2

If you have downloaded Feed Demon the link should open in the subscription wizard, using the online reader you my need to copy the link and add it (without feed:)

RSS is the coolest technology I have used in quite some time and I hope that you take this opportunity to try it out, you might agree with me.

Please email me with any questions you might have at techhelp@cybercreations.net and hopefully I will be able to provide an answer for you.

If you have any furhter suggestions for future articles on this or any other topics please feel free to email them.

FeedDemon, News, Newsletter, RSS