What is RSS?

What is RSS? There seems to be a lot of confusion about RSS and what and RSS feed can do for you.  I get a number of questions at regular intervals regarding RSS.  I hope I can clear things up a bit here.

Do you want to stay current and up-to-date the latest targeted traffic tactics and tools along with the many other posts in YourTrafficStarterBlog?

The simplest and easiest way to keep up with what’s going on is to use our RSS feed.  But why use RSS?

Why use RSS?

It is really quite simple.  RSS is a technology that is used worldwide to allow millions of internet users everywhere follow their favorite websites.

Bookmarking used to be the only way to do this, and you are forced to manually return to the website on a regular interval and figure out on your own what has been changed or updated.

Bookmarking has numerous problems

• You are forced to do all the work updating
• It easily becomes confused when you are tracking many sites
• You miss the most important updates because you can’t remember to get back to all the sites
• You get frustrated seeing all the wrong info repeatedly, instead of the updates you want

RSS to the Rescue!

If you could force any website to tell when it was updated every time it occurred, and only the websites you wanted, wouldn’t this make your browsing much happier?  RSS pretty much accomplishes this for you.

RSS, then, is the opposite of bookmarking.  It is a simple, convenient way of getting only the information you consider relevant for your needs.  It updates you automatically, and let’s you read the latest information when you are ready to.  A lot of time is saved not having to search, and you get the new stuff as soon as it is posted.

So RSS is an acronym that means Really Simple Syndication and is often called a news feed because you can subscribe to it.

Personally, I use it to simplify my research.  It’s very much like having tons of magazine subscriptions that always update on their own, and are delivered directly to my desktop RSS reader for me to read when I am ready.  I never have to search for updates.  A note comes to my email, and tells me of the update, just in case I haven’t been checking my reader.  This is great, and much better than getting all that stuff in the regular mail.  Plus, I never have to surf and waste time I need for other stuff as I try to locate the updates I want.

RSS is not something that requires a deep technical knowledge about to use.  So I won’t even talk about that. It isn’t even important to know any of the technical aspects.

At first I thought it was a little odd.  I didn’t know what to do.  But when I figured out all I had to do was press a couple of button on the screen and I was all set up, I ditched the bookmarks, and went pure RSS.  There isn’t anything better.

How to Use RSS

You must have an RSS Reader – RSS is read with an RSS Feed Reader.  The good thing is, there are tons of them and they are free.

Since there are so many with so many different features, I think the best place to go is Google Reader or iGoogle; or maybe Bloglines (very compatible with everything).  I use Bloglines.  Lots of people use Google.  Both work great and can be used with any RSS.

They all work similar to email.  When you make your subscription to the feeds, you are shown the unread entries from your favorite sites with the tracking shown in bold.  Clicking on them will take you to the latest update which is read directly in the reader.  The readers also give you the option to go directly to the real site where the RSS feed originated or to simply to go to the next item you haven’t read.

They are really easy, so pick one and just meander around and get the feel.  You will see that it is really easy like I said.  There is great help at both the sites I told you about.  You’ll be fully functional in no time.

How to Find Feeds to Subscribe – two quick places to look for your RSS feeds:

1. Directly on the Site
2. In the browser you are using

Subscribing Onsite

Many sites will present you an array of icons and buttons, or widgets.  Usually, ones for RSS feeds are orange.  Some show different information like the number of subscribers to the site.  Others are showing the type feed they have – XML, ATOM, RSS and others.

Here are some common ones you’ll see:

I can’t begin to show them all, but you get the picture, there really are tons of them.

Subscribe from Your Browser

Browser like IE and Firefox give you the capability to find a feed and subscribe to it built right into the browser.

It’s easy to tell when a site you’re searching has an RSS feed simply by looking in the address bar.  When you surf to a site you can usually tell if it has an RSS feed by looking in the right hand side of address bar where you type in the site’s URL.

On YourTrafficStarterBlog it looks like this in Firefox:

The orange icon the arrow is pointing to is the one.  Click it and you are take YourTrafficStarterBlog RSS feed.

It’s similar in other browsers.

You can usually tell your browser what feed reader to use in the default settings.  Just check your browser preferences and enter the reader you want to use.

After setting this up and subscribing a couple of times, you’ll see how really great it is to use RSS feeds for your unread items and staying up to date.

Don’t like RSS Readers? Use your email…

If all of this seems like it is way too much, then you can also get the RSS feeds by email by subscribing through the sign up.  I usually do both, particularly for sites I want to know immediately that they updated.  I am good at forgetting to check my reader.

Of course I know that everyone doesn’t think the RSS is such a hot thing.  So you can sign up for my newsletter at the top right of the page, and receive a weekly summary of the posts by email newsletter.  Like any good newsletter, you can unsubscribe anytime you desire.  I keep all subscription information private, and never share any data you send to subscribe to YourTrafficStarter publications or any publications of HMI Group LLC.