RSS is an awesome tool for disseminating information:
It allows publishers to spread information about the articles and news they post on their websites.
It allows people searching for information on given topics to subscribe to feed readers and to be kept updated on news being posted on their topic of interest.
It allows website owners to bring onto their pages feeds on relevant subjects from other sites.
If you are a publisher, you create RSS feeds (in a text compiler - using a specific format) and post them on your server.
You then publish your RSS file URL to the RSS Feed Server Pages.
You can also create a piece of code that other website owners can copy and paste on their pages that links them to your RSS feed and displays it on their site.
If you are a reader, you subscribe to the selection of feeds that interest you on any of the RSS Feed Servers.
If you want to bring feeds onto your site you need to subscribe on the RSS Feed Servers, or if the site whose RSS you wanty to access has a code for a feed display, you copy and paste that where you want it to display on your pages.
Here are just a few of the very many Feed Server Pages that are the lifeblood of this system. As you will see if you click on these, a couple of them are set up for subscribing to RSS feeds for one of our sister sites, Health News NZ - as a publisher you can actually set these links up to take visitors to your site directly to the subscribe page for your own feed:
Subscribe in Feedburner Subscribe in NewsGator Online Subscribe in My Yahoo
Here is a sample RSS feed:
[?xml version="1.0" ?]
[rss version="2.0"]
[channel]
[title]HEALTH NEWS NZ[/title]
[link]http://www.healthnews-nz.com[/link]
[description]Vital Information about Health and Wellbeing[/description]
[webMaster]patriciahowitt@xtra.co.nz[/webMaster]
[language]en-us[/language]
[copyright]2005 Patricia Howitt[/copyright]
[item]
[title]Angstrom-Size Minerals for Health[/title]
[link]http://www.healthnews-nz.com/angstrom.html[/link]
[description]Why are Angstrom-sized Minerals the most important discovery ever to come to your attention? What do Angstrom-sized Minerals have to offer that is completely unique? Click above to read the rest of the story.[/description]
[/item]
[/channel]
[/rss]
To get this to display properly I have replaced < with [ and > with ] - if you want to use this as a template, you will need to replace the changed brackets again.
At WebDev they have a RSS Code Generator that will generate a feed with up to 10 RSS Headlines for you:
WebDev
You will find one of the best RSS publisher services on the net at Feedburner. They have a very good beginners explanation of what RSS is about HERE. If you decide to go into RSS feeds I strongly recommend that one of the first things you do once you create your feeds is go and create an account with them - it is free - and read up on how you can make the most of your feeds:
Feedburner
I will go into more detail about publishing your RSS feeds shortly.
