RSS: A Quick Definition

SirThom

SirThom

New Member
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a method of transferring content to users easily. RSS feeds, hosted at a remote location, can contain various types of content. Popular examples are recent news stories (like CNN), new posts on blogs, or Podcasts (like This Week in Tech). Generally, these new items are added to the RSS feed automatically as they are being posted.

That's one end of the equation. The RSS feed is then downloaded by an RSS feed reader on your computer, which formats the feed into something easier to read. As new items are added to the feed, they appear in your RSS feed reader.

Popular feed readers: Mozilla Thunderbird, Sage (a Firefox plugin), NetNewsWire (for Mac). Feed readers are also built into IE7, Firefox and Safari, but they may not have the functionality as some other readers.
 
IE7 also supports RSS.

Personally, I use GoogleReader as a easy way to be able to access my feeds wherever I'm at on whatever computer I'm on.
 
lol, clever :D

I still don't understand I guess why they are useful, or if they are more convenient, or just a preference some people have :-\
 
Many users find it useful to add a bunch of feeds into their reader, and then easily see what the new stories are as they come in. Generally you can look at a list of the articles you still haven't read, etc.

And, RSS is also good for us developers because it opens up other doors. For example, Amazon.com has a system where you can get a type of RSS feed that contains product information. MusicSig (as well as a few other projects of mine) used this special RSS feed to get the cover, artist and title information, and Amazon's current price.
 
So it's kinda like (pardon the lame analogy) if you had something to gather your new text messages from 10 different phone numbers in the same place? Except with forum posts, news, email, etc?
 
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