what is a rss feed and why you should use it

July 31, 2010 by gloria marie in blogging & social networking | Leave a comment

Hello there! If you are new here, would love for you to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

what is rss?

RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based.” – wikipedia.org

why you should use rss

if you read a lot of blogs you should consider a rss reader to put all those blogs’ content in one place. there are many different readers out there, but i use google reader and it works perfectly fine for me. i can organize all of my feed content into categories, like blogs dealing with photography or news. it’s like a personalized newspaper. one page with all of your favorite content there for you. google reader even has this feature where you can drag a “next” button into your browser tool bar and you can surf through your subscribed content, visiting the actual page where the content is, this is good if you want to enjoy the design and feel of particular pages.

for web masters/bloggers: feedburner.com (bought by google) is an excellent service for managing your feeds. it keeps track of how many people actually subscribe to your content, and so on.

and since i am shameless, subscribe to my feed to stay connected with me and not miss any content!