Middle Ear Media

RSS Feeds Explained

September 29th, 2009

Have you ever noticed the sheer amount of infor­ma­tion on the inter­net? It’s become over­whelm­ing and guess what? It’s only going to grow! So con­tent pub­lish­ers need to find ways to make it eas­ier for their audi­ence to receive their content.

The con­cept behind RSS is really sim­ple. So sim­ple in fact that RSS stands for Really Sim­ple Syn­di­ca­tion. RSS is one of the most pop­u­lar for­mats used to dis­trib­ute con­tent on the inter­net. Also known as a Web Feed, it is a great way to get your con­tent out to the masses if you have a blog, news site, or really any web­site with con­tent that is updated frequently.

You have prob­a­bly seen RSS Feed icons before, even if you didn’t know what they were. There is a (sort of) stan­dard RSS icon that looks like an orange square with some white curved lines inside it. How­ever, many design­ers want their feed icon to match the look of their site so they cus­tomize it. There is no limit to how cre­ative these icons can be, but at the end of the day they must ful­fill their func­tion of let­ting your read­ers know they can sub­scribe to your content.

So, how do you sub­scribe to a feed? First, you’ll need a news reader (also known as a feed reader or news aggre­ga­tor). Some news read­ers are web-based such as Live Book­marks, Yahoo, News Gator, Blog­lines, Netvibes, Google, Page­flakes, Feed­De­mon, RSSOwl, Net­NewsWire, News­Fire, Shrook, etc. Oth­ers are located on your own com­puter. Many Email clients such as Mozilla’s Thun­der­bird, and Microsoft’s Out­look or Out­look Express also func­tion as news read­ers. I pre­fer Thun­der­bird, but that’s just me.

Once you have a feed reader, go to the web­site you want to sub­scribe to and sim­ply click on the RSS or feed icon. Then copy the URL from the address bar at the top of your browser. It will prob­a­bly look some­thing like

http://www.middleearmedia.com/feed/

but not nec­es­sar­ily. Alter­na­tively, you can right click the RSS or feed icon and select “Copy Short­cut” or “Copy Link Loca­tion” to copy the address of the feed. Go to your news reader and find the option that lets you add con­tent or feeds. This should open up a win­dow with a field to add the URL of the feed you want to sub­scribe to. Place your cur­sor in this field and right click your mouse then select Paste.

In Thun­der­bird for exam­ple, click News & Blogs, then click Man­age sub­scrip­tions, click the Add but­ton in the win­dow that pops up, and paste the address into the Feed URL field.

RSS is not the only kid on the content-syndication block. There are other ways to deliver con­tent such as Atom, Email, SMS Text, and most recently ser­vices such as Twit­ter have been get­ting in on the action.

Tags: blog, Content Delivery, Email, Feed, feed reader, Icons, News, news aggregator, news reader, RSS, SMS Text, subscribe, Syndication, Thunderbird, Twitter

This entry was posted in the Uncategorized category.