What is RSS (Really Simple Syndication)?

RSS is a way of tracking the updated news or contents from the websites. It determines a simple way to view the headlines and contents and it can mechanically update. RSS, written in XML, allows individualized view for different websites, each can customize the RSS contents displayed.

Why RSS?

RSS was developed to show relevant and updated contents. It simplifies search for updated news/contents in a website and as well reduce the unwanted contents and advertisements.

RSS was used for who searched for updated contents through online on a regular basis. Since RSS data is humble and quick loading, it will assure your website run faster using RSS collector.

It will save your time by don’t want to check each sites separately.

When do RSS arrived?

RSS is for webmasters who often update their web contents.

  • RSS was born in 1997, developed by Dave Winer.  He developed the first scripting news in the same year.
  • The next version of RSS was introduced by Netscape named RSS 0.90, it was merely XML with RDF(Resource Description Framework) header.
  • In 1999, Dave Winer developed Scripting News 2.0b1 at UserLand which includes RSS 0.90 features. Netscape managed to develop and release new other version RSS 0.91 the same year, in which they took out RDF Header and included more features from ScriptingNews 2.0b1.
  • In 2000, RSS was subjected to different development perspective and the notable events are as follow
  • UserLand launched the official version of RSS 0.91.
  • RSS 1.0 was developed by Rael Dornfest(Group Lead) in O’Reilly in the year 2000, using RDF and namespaces. This is a completely new format and stood totally different from RSS 0.91 version.
  • RSS 0.92 was developed by Dave Winer at UserLand.
  • In 2002, Dave Winer left UserLand and started developing the version RSS 2.0. In 2003 the official RSS 2.0 was released.

How does it Works?

The process is simple. We create RSS documents in .xml format, upload the file in our site and then register RSS contents with aggregator.

The aggregator search the RSS documents from websites registered to it at frequent intervals. It verify the website links and displays the feeds details to the client or the end user.

Here’s how an RSS code look like:

< ?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”UTF-8” ?>
<rss version=”2.0”>
<channel>
<title>My Sample RSS Docs</title>
<link>http://www.mysampleRSS.com</link>
<description>MY First sample RSS feed document with sample coding</description>
<item>
<title>My Sample RSS Docs</title>
<link>http://www.mysampleRSS.com</link>
<description>MY First sample RSS feed document with sample coding</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>My Sample RSS Docs</title>
<link>http://www.mysampleRSS.com</link>
<description>MY First sample RSS feed document with sample coding</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>My Sample RSS Docs</title>
<link>http://www.mysampleRSS.com</link>
<description>MY First sample RSS feed document with sample coding</description>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

The Channel is a parent element which constituted more than one child elements called Item. Channel and Item has three required attributes namely,

  1. Title – Title of the main Channel or the Item
  2. Link – Defines the hyperlink to the channel in channel and the full description link to the item
  3. Description – In channel, it describes the channel info, In item it gives small intro of the item details.

Some more elements found in RSS documents are author, pubdate, category, image, language, rating, comments and more.

What kind of information do RSS Feed support?

RSS is considered to be a great communication tool and as mentioned, it acts as an aggregator to view the updated and multiple content from a list of links subscribed. Following are the list of feeds RSS supports

  1. News Monitoring
  2. Blog Updates
  3. Article Feed
  4. Forum Feed
  5. Discount/Offer Feed
  6. Industry-Specific RSS Feed

Since RSS has been popular right from its inception, webmasters continue to experiment the advantage of using RSS in their website certainly to reach more audiences through syndication. It is an easier and less expensive way to communicate with your customers.

Explore more of RSS and be benefited by personally connecting with your customers regularly.