AND WHY DO I NEED TO KNOW?
RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. And it has also been referred to as ‘Rich Site Summary’.
It’s a neat feature that has become very commonplace on many internet sites and it is a great resource, one that you should know about, even if you don’t choose to use an ‘RSS Feed’ or an ‘RSS Reader’.
This tool, feature, option, functionality, that’s the thing, it is an item for the toolbox, you decide what fits.
It very easily allows you to view all of the ‘blogging’ or ‘posting’ or ‘blog posting’ activity on any given website by clicking on the RSS button and subscribing to the ‘feed’. Nice, easy, simple.
Try it … at the top of the page, click the real, live, RSS Button … “do it, do it now” … can you hear the Geico commercial with the ‘hang-in-there-baby’ cat in your brain? and concomitantly the French secret agency staffer fella who makes the recording for Arnold Schwarzenegger in the True Lies movie, so he can tell his wife to … “do it, do it slowly”? We have digressed.
Different browsers show or arrange the material differently. And for the most part all of the browsers give you a pull-down menu so that you can choose which ‘RSS Feed Reader’ you prefer.
But don’t even try it in Chrome … use Firefox, or Opera. The http feed address or URL will display nicely. When you see how cleanly the content displays, you might get hooked on RSS. There are a bunch of ‘RSS Readers’ out there.
Subscribe or Unsubscribe. The control is all yours. Maybe you want to get a feel for a website before you sign-up and give an email address? No problem, the RSS Feed is the way to go.
Remember, in an RSS Feed you get only the blog posts. Any other goodies and new information that are becoming part of the structure of an entire website cannot all get stuffed into the RSS Feed.
Nothing compares to visiting a website directly, but an RSS Feed makes it easier to keep up with newly written material, and if you want to visit the site directly the links to the website are right there in the feed.
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IMAGE CREDITS:
1. RSS BUTTON ~ By Quage9/Aquaticus Social Icon Pack ~ http://www.quake9.com/ ~ CC BY-ND 3.0
2. SPACE JUNK ~ By David Shikomba ~ http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space_Junk.jpg ~ CC BY-SA 3.0
3. YUMMY ICON SET ~ By Icon Eden ~ http://www.iconeden.com/icon/yummy-free-icons.html ~ Attribution Required
