Tag Archives: RSS

Does anyone really use RSS anymore?

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RSS : what is it? How to read it and how to use it

[I wrote this article some time ago and you will see how old it is now. Everyone uses Feedburner now, but since Google took it over, you need a google account.  Personally I only subscribe to a blog if there is provision for email distribution, as my blog has. Do subscribe :) ]

RSS is the name given to a simple and well-established XML format used to syndicate news. Once a website creates an RSS file they have created a means to allow others to syndicate their news.

The first version of RSS (RSS 0.9) was released by Netscape in March 1999 as a format for adding news channels to their My.Netscape.Com portal.
Then in July 1999 Netscape released RSS 0.91, incorporating most of the features of a format called <scriptingNews>, which was created by UserLand. Shortly thereafter Netscape discontinued developing the RSS
format, however UserLand persisted and RSS continued to grow in strength.
In December 2000, the separate RSS-DEV Working Group released RSS 1.0 and Userland announced RSS 0.92. As of April 2001, Userland is now planning RSS 0.93. Although RSS is not clearly an acronym of anything, different
people have called it Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication at different times.

The lack of clarity in what RSS stands for or which version is the correct one to use can seem confusing to beginners. However these issues don’t need to addressed by a website wanting to create an RSS file. RSS is a very well recognized format, in fact it is often referred to as the most successful XML format to date. Some websites have a preference for oneversion, others create more than one RSS file and support multiple versions and a recent survey suggests that the first two versions of RSS (0.9 and 0.91) are still by far the most popular.

Everyone must have seen one of those orange buttons called XML by now. Why are they being used? I suppose it was in place of newsletters and a way to avoid one’s newsletter being dumped in a spam folder. That’s what happened
to some of my newsletters and they are not spam. It’s a way to make a page ‘sticky’. People will come back frequently. It’s also a way to let people know quickly if your site is updated. They are used most frequently on blogs, which have themselves exploded over the past year.

It’s a good idea to have an RSS reader just in case you see a site which you want to subscribe to, so let’s discuss this first. Most of them have items on them already, but you can delete what you don’t want. There’s the Google reader and another popular one is NewsGator. These are free.

Both readers explain how to get the news into your RSS readers, but the general idea is to click on the XML button or the place where the site directs you to get the feed and then open your RSS reader or aggregator and add that .xml file and the title of the site.

Okay, now you want to put one on your site, don’t you. Not many static sites would do this and nor would any that didn’t have an hourly turnover of new stuff on the web site. So you do, or you want to put it on yourblog.

Here’s a good link to learn from

http://www.webreference.com/xml/column13/index.html

RSS Wizard or Feed Editor or Feed Mix

If all this seems to difficult you can easily create, edit and publish rss feeds. New RSS feeds can be quickly and easily created with FeedForAll.
Advanced features enable you to create professional looking rss feeds quickly.
Existing RSS feeds can be repaired and enhanced with FeedForAll.
RSS feeds generated by other means can be automatically repaired, so that they conform to the RSS 2.0 specification. Existing feeds can be enhanced to contain advanced feed properties.

Ping aggregators to let them know that you’ve created an RSS feed. In order to let the world wide web know that your feed is up and running, you must give them a Ping. This is very easy to do – just go to http://pingomatic.com
and choose the appropriate sites to inform. Select blog related sites if you’re a blog and non-blog related sites for other content. Complete the information and Ping. Another site you should Ping is Yahoo! Simply visit the Yahoo!
RSS submit page and add your feed URL. This will let the big boys know that your syndicating.

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"The Age", a Melbourne newspaper's, RSS

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What is my life coming to when I don’t read newspapers anymore. Of course one reason is that there is only the usual non-investigative journalism in them or that the opinion pieces are so right wing that they aren’t worth reading. But I guess being a Melburnian I’ll always check out “The Age”. I’ve just discovered a loophole here too, electronically. As a librarian, I know that old Ages cannot be accessed without paying, but if you subscribe to the feed, some articles remain.
You can subscribe to about 6 different feeds.

http://theage.com.au/rsschannels/

Blogs or web sites

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You know when I started designing web sites, blogs didn’t exist. My first web site was made with Microsoft Publisher and a little bit of HTML knowledge. Pretty well every webmy dog site then took an age to download, even if I had had cable then, and had heaps of large graphics and lots of animated graphics. Text was big and the design was usually pretty poor.

By the time I bought dreamweaver, in preference to Front Page, thank God, I was ready to get my own domain name and host. Dreamweaver was pretty easy to learn and I thought, great, this is the best thing since sliced bread.

Then there were all those books in computer book stores about Java and PHP and I didn’t have a clue. But I did learn how to use javascripts not as a developer of them, but as a web designer.

Now we were suddenly going up to XHTML and CSS had arrived. It was all going too fast for me. I’ve managed both of those now, sort of, but we are almost back to a full circle with build a page, wikis, blogs, swickis all of which means that no-one has to know any code.

There’s debate all the time about which way the internet is going to go next. Was it going to be a content management system or was it going to be a blog?

I’ve used both and even had a forum at one time too. But it is only now that I have added WordPress to my site. And I like it.

With my web site, I tried DHTML menus so that every time I added a page I could update the menu in a flash. I’ve learnt Paint Shop pro, but not everything about Photoshop. I’ve made video tutorials that go to YouTube and I’ve made some podcasts. I love technology.

I could never afford much, so any spare cash went on the computer and we now have 2 networked. I’ve never done any IT study.

I find it almost impossible to keep up with all the changes, so the blog makes it easier to write a page and have it indexed almost immediately. Word Press has so many plugins to make it like a web site. There are not just posts here.

Should I change my whole site over to this blog or have it as a quick update of news to do with web design? Maybe not. I’d lose whatever ranking I have.

But which will do better? I have added google analytics to this blog so I can see my visitors. This blog is still only a month old so I don’t expect too many click throughs yet. I have a number of subscribers to my feed already though.

That’s another thing about blogs. A person can see all your posts in one click in their reader of RSS feeds. Subscriptions to web sites like I have seem to be slowing down. RSS is so much easier, although I may add an email subscription to my feed also.

I think too that most of the interesting stuff is appearing more on blogs than web sites. Of course the corporations and small businesses need their web sites. They don’t need to be changed that much, but whenever you go to google adsense or google analytics for example, do they care much about design? I don’t think so. They don’t need to.

Some blogs and web sites are really beautiful and I still like a good looking site.

Anyway, what do you think? What will be the future of the internet and please don’t say mobile phones.

Oh? About the eyes on the dog. I’ll get rid of the blue pupils for the next post and tell you how I did that as if you didn’t know!

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