A Twitter friend wanted to know what RSS was, and it struck me that a bunch of people probably know, but they don’t know, what RSS really is.Think of the web and how all pages look different and have lots of bits of data all over the place. RSS is like the great equalizer, that let’s web pages talk to each other.
It’s most commonly associated with Blogs, but every web page is stored in memory by the browser in XML and can be output to RSS (see feed43 to transform a page without an RSS feed into one).
HTML and RSS
RSS means Really Simple Syndication. It’s synonymous with XML, a data format for web pages. Let’s take an example to understand the difference between markup, HTML, and data, XML (the data format of RSS). Every web browser uses XML to render every page. It takes this data, the XML, and makes it look a certain way using the HTML markup.
The HTML markup has been greatly simplified by CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. So you could take data in the form of XML, and display the same page so that it looks like the wild west MySpace, or the more austere Facebook. You’ll notice that I’m constantly changing my themes on this site. It’s because I get bored. I don’t change the site at all, I just switch the theme for the XML, so that there is different styles applied to the same semantic markup which looks different to you.
Different colors, fonts and layouts, same data. Now you understand what XML and RSS is and can teach your friends. Try it, explaining RSS to your friend is the best way for you to learn and reinforce what you learn. If you can’t answer your friends question, come back here or use “the google” and find out more.
Since every browser uses XML as the data source to then render the page, of course you can also turn that same data into an RSS feed. That’s why when you use Google reader all the feeds look mostly the same, and when you click through to a particular article and land on someones site then the html kicks in and it looks well, different, then it does in your feed reader.
The RSS is the stripped out version of the data on your site, pumped through a universal piping that other things can understand. No matter how wild and crazy you made your HTML look, XML is the powerful beast living under those crazy covers.
Big Orange Friend
Let’s say you were walking along a street, and you were a blog. You have a big puffy orange RSS friend walking with you, holding your hand. You run into someone, who seems alright but you’re not too sure. You get their business card, you’re probably just going to throw it away. That’s like a bookmark.
Now let’s say you run into a guy or a girl who seems pretty interesting. Maybe you’d like to know them a little more. You grab their RSS and at your convenience you can keep getting updates on them. They can grab your RSS and get updates on you. Since blogs really benefit from interlinking, if you don’t use Feedburner and you put someone’s RSS feed directly on your site, those links will go directly back to the site (and vice versa if they add yours).
That big puffy orange guy RSS is pretty useful. He’s like a lingua franca, the translator between your blog and other people’s blog. Where RSS is getting really interesting is with this whole social media thing, like twitter, tumblr, jaiku and twitterfeed. What people are now doing with RSS is if you publish a blog, you can put your RSS into these contraptions that will automagically update your twitter feed. As people follow that Twitter feed, an article you wrote might catch their eye.
Then they get to their site, grab your big orange friend, and then you are having a bigger global conversation without any extra effort. Powerful. Like a good lingua franca, the RSS makes sure that things don’t break between your site auto updating your twitter feed. It’s pretty geeky, most people don’t really understand it, they just sort of know how to use it and act like they know what it is.Don’t like the big orange friend? Then let’s try an example.
Blog Publishing Example
Let’s say I publish a blog. A blog post has a title, a body with the blog post and other standard things. My blog software makes it available in RSS, otherwise known as a “feed”.Let’s say you showed up at my blog and you liked what I have to say. Maybe you are curious about what I have to say in the future.
If you bookmarked me you’d probably forget about it (go ahead though if you feel like it). If you grabbed my feed, you’d be able to keep in touch with me better. Companies like Feedburner even let you receive these by email (confusing, I know). What happens there is you give an email address to them, they hook up the feed, and whenever there is anything new such as a new post you get an email. Click on it, and you are on the site for that feed.
Think of it as a shadow version of that site - same data, different format. You can then read it in your RSS reader, live as it’s continuously updated (hopefully for a small site, all big sites are frequently updated).
You can add the address to that RSS feed to your feed reader, it takes that data in a standard format and presents it to you in your reader or other places you can stick an rss feed. You could read ten blogs this way through your reader, and they wouldn’t have all the formatting such as pictures and colors from the blog. Your RSS reader reads all these feeds, and knows how to because it’s all standard.
Why the heck would you want to do this, you might be asking yourself?
If you are a website publisher or a blogger, you want distribution (eyeballs, traffic, whatever you want to call it). You want your stuff read as much as possible. So if some random person shows up at your site, grabs your feed, and sticks it in her reader, then she might like a title or headline of one of your posts. She clicks on it, and voila, he is on your site.
She might click on on an add or do something useful, she might not. But that added distribution is a good thing because it gets people coming back to your site. So that little RSS feed is like a portable version of your site, always updating, always in synch with what is your site. As a person who publishes things on the web, you usually use HTML to present it on your site. When you output it via RSS it’s similar, the same data, just presented differently.
If you use any major blogging platform of course it makes the RSS for you automatically, you just have cajole people who come to your site to get your feed.If you are not a publisher or blogger, and you just like to keep on top of a bunch of things, you could use an RSS reader to read through a ton of different sites, scanning for interesting headlines. You click on the ones you want and ignore the rest.
There is some maniac podcaster who supposedly reads 600 or so a day using this method (right, everyday). You can also add them to your browser, using something called Smart Bookmarks in Firefox. So if you added something like http://mysweetblog/sweet.rss to your Smart Bookmarks, you could click on it any time, and the MOST recent items would be there like little bookmarks, just waiting for you to click on them.
If you wanted to, you could also take that feed and put it on your blog so whenever I update my blog it would update those headlines on your site. It works that way because it’s a standard for this data transferring.That’s my take on it, if you have any other questions, add them in the comments and we’ll see if we can’t sort it out!Thanks ZenOptic on the photo of the big orange thingamabob.
