What is RSS?

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, allows content creators, like bloggers, news outlets, magazines, or any person or group with information they want to broadcast, a really simple way to do it.

At its most basic, creating an RSS feed is just like sending an email message, lets call it a piece of news, to a LISTSERV, except you are not sending email that people must read, delete or deal with if they do not wish to. You create it with software installed on a web server which tags the news with an XML file extension rather than an HTML extension. What this means to us, is that anyone with an RSS reader can subscribe to our "feed" and automatically receive any new entries we add.

"What!" you ask, "We must install and learn NEW software to do this?!" Well, yes. RSS readers are able to interpret XML documents. An XML document as viewed in a regular browser looks like this:

<rss version="2.0">

-

<channel>

<title>TechRepublic.com</title>

<link>http://www.techrepublic.com/</link>

<description>Real World. Real Time. Real IT.</description>

<language>en-us</language>
-

<copyright>

Copyright &copy;1995-2005 CNET Networks, Inc. All rights reserved.

</copyright>

<pubDate>Mon, 03 Apr 2006 17:11:47 PDT</pubDate>

<lastBuildDate>Mon, 03 Apr 2006 17:11:47 PDT</lastBuildDate>

<category>TechRepublic.com</category>

<generator>CNET</generator>

<docs>http://techrepublic.com.com/1200-22-5154511.html</docs>

<ttl>10</ttl>

What! Another piece os software!!!

When I first heard about RSS, the question that came to my mind was: Why is RSS any different or better than any other way I collect news and information? Well, RSS isn't necessarily any better, but it creates an alternative form to accessing information in which the news comes to you rahter than you going out to find it. It is also important to note that RSS feeds HTML pages are not mutually exclusive to one another. More often than not, the RSS syndicated feed is a teaser to the Web site which contains richer content.

To begin collecting and reading RSS feeds, you will have to choose from umpteen different software products. By and large they are free. They are easy to use and easy to install.

Rather than spend time reviewing a variety of products now, About.com has a guide to"Top 10 Windows RSS Feed Readers / News Aggregators" Here are just a few screenshots.


FEEDDEMON!

OMEA

Google Reader, a Web-Based RS reader, no software to download!

Bloglines, another Browser based RSS reader.

Newz Crawler

Looks Like a browser, don't it?

As you can see, the Readers look quite a bit like a regular browser. The main difference in the display is the hierarchical levels of navigation. The left vertical "frame" lists the Feed's to which you subscribe. The top horizontal frame lists the chronological headlines for the selected feed, in the above example, BBC News: Technology. Finally, the lower horizontal frame displays the whole story, in the example above, "Microsoft may still face EU fine."

Now that we know what they are, how do we subscribe to an RSS feed?
Many Blogs or news sites will make subscribing easy for you by providing an automatic subscription upon clicking a link an XML or RSS button, like these: .

Essentially what you are doing is creating a link in your RSS reader to the selected site's XML tagged page. They look are URLs with .XML and the end rather than .HMTL. Like this: http://randomblog.com/index.xml. If I added this URL to my browser it looks like this:

and in an RSS reader, it looks like this:


Let's subscribe to a blog feed. A few weeks ago, Burks Oakley presented a seminar on podcasting and his Burks on Learning blog is an interesting read for teachers utilizing the Web. To find it, We'll use the blog search engine Technorati, www.technorati.com.



When we've copied that url, we then paste it into our feed reader. The reader in my example is WIZZ RSS 2.0.6, a plugin for the firefox browser.




So, what if we want to create our own RSS feed. ...

Well, one of the services provided by this blog is that it publishes both the html and the xml files for every blog post. By creating this blog, I already have an RSS feed!
The UIC Daley library has implemented blog software on the "rivendell" server: http://rivendell.lib.uic.edu/

These blogs / RSS feeds are still in a test phase. The blog software behind the UIC blogs is called "Moveable Type." It is one blogging software product of the company, "Six apart" their homepage is here: http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/

In our case, the systems team installed the moveable type software on a Web server, rivendell, and viola, we can syndicate content, really simply!