Thursday, September 15, 2005

What is RSS?

RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs. The abbreviation is used to refer to the following standards:

* Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
* RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)
* Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

The technology behind RSS allows you to subscribe to websites that have provided RSS feeds, these are typically sites that change or add content regularly. To use this technology you need to set up some type of aggregation service. Think of this aggregation service as your personal mailbox. You then have to subscribe to the sites that you want to get updates on. Unlike typical subscriptions to pulp-based newspapers and magazines, your RSS subscriptions are free, but they typically only give you a line or two of each article or post along with a link to the full article or post.

The RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data. This information is delivered as an XML file called RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. In addition to facilitating syndication, RSS allows a website's frequent readers to track updates on the site using a news aggregator.

** this was taken from Wikipedia

well, you can subscribe to my blog's RSS feed :D

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