What is RSS?

RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a language a website can use to produce summaries of its recently updated content in a form which personal news readers and other websites can republish. RSS feeds allow users to read headlines from many different websites at once. Instead of repeatedly checking your favorite sites, you can check...

What is RSS?

RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a language a website can use to produce summaries of its recently updated content in a form which personal news readers and other websites can republish. RSS feeds allow users to read headlines from many different websites at once. Instead of repeatedly checking your favorite sites, you can check your news aggregator service in a web browser or through an email client. From your web-based or desktop news aggregator you will see latest headlines and teasers from feeds to which you subscribe. These headlines are linked to corresponding content on the original website that produced it. An example of this is the “Development Seed Official Blog” box on http://www.developmentseed.org/. This box is syndicating the latest entries from our web-log at http://www.developmentseed.org/blog. The link to the RSS feed is http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/?q=node/feed.

Think of it this way – instead of going to websites to see what is new, subscribe to their feeds and receive the updates like you receive email, either to a web-based aggregator (like web mail) or a desktop aggregator (like popping email with an email client, but easier to setup :-) ). You can enter the link above (http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/?q=node/feed) into a news aggregator to receive Development Seed’s latest blog entries.

Who has RSS?

Many news websites such as Yahoo News and the BBC, and blogs or community sites, like the Development Seed Blog or IDPSA.org, offer content in syndicated format. Users browsing sites with RSS will usually see a small orange box somewhere on the website with the letters XML or RSS which indicates a feed is available.

How does this work?

News aggregators display RSS feeds, translating the signal from a selected website into a headline and additional information, like date, author, teaser, and more. An aggregator can be used on a website to republish headlines from one website to another (like we do by publishing the latest entries from the Development Seed Blog onto the Development Seed main website. As an end user, a person may take advantage of desktop news aggregators like those built into Mozilla’s FireFox web browsers, in the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, or through many other stand alone desktop applications.

By incorporating an aggregator application on a website, organizations can constantly and automatically provide new information to their visitors about news and other information from other sources, such as partner organizations or allies. For example, an organization can use an aggregator on their own website to republish event listings from IDPSA.org (and you can be specific and only republish events which are categorized as “conferences” [try creating an event on IDPSA.org and you will see how you can categorize it…]). You can use aggregators to syndicate headlines from many different websites and display the information in a completely customized design on your own website.

It’s also simple to receive RSS syndicated content right to your computer. Just plug in the address of the RSS files that you would like, such as the Development Seed Blog main feed at http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/?q=node/feed/, into your news aggregator. Copy this URL or another feed URL you find from the address bar of your web browser and insert it in your aggregator. Each aggregator is a little different so the setup might differ depending on the application you choose to use. Here are some suggested news aggregators for users, both web-based and desktop based:

Web-based Aggregators:

Bloglines
My Yahoo!

Desktop Aggregators:

FeedDemon (for Windows)
NetNewsWire (for Macs)
AmphetaDesk (Windows, Mac and Linux).
Mozilla offers news aggregators in several of their open source products, including Firefox with LiveBookmarks and Thunderbird, which is also a great email client alternative to Microsoft's Outlook.

Please make more recommendations by adding a comment on this page.