Free Website Content
RSS - All About News You Choose
Why is RSS So Magical?
The answer is simple: RSS is news you choose.
How Does it Work?
Publishers and webmasters provide content and news in
an RSS feed. Users view the content of interest in an
RSS reader or news aggregator. The aggregator or reader
contains the collection of feeds that are of interest
to the user. As the RSS feed is updated the content
in the reader or aggregator updates with the new information.
At any point, users can remove a feed from their aggregator
or reader and no longer receive information from that
source. Ultimately, the user is choosing the news and
content they wish to view.
As RSS has increased in popularity more
and more webmasters and publishers have adopted RSS
as an alternative communication stream. Webmasters use
an RSS graphic to indicate the content is available
via RSS.
RSS Aggregators and News Readers
Generally, there are three types of RSS readers that
users use to view feeds that they've subscribed to.
Feeds can be viewed in a desktop application, web-based
aggregator, or plug-in aggregator.
Desktop RSS Readers
Standalone desktop applications generally run in the
background, similar to an e-mail client, automatically
refreshing headlines as newfeeds are updated. The RSS
readers collect the feeds and refresh items in the feeds
each time they are updated. An example of a popular
standalone desktop RSS reader is: FeedDemon - http://www.feeddemon.com
Web Based Aggregators
Web-based news aggregators are online services. In simple
terms, you can personalize a web page. Each time that
page is accessed or each time you login to the service,
the web page news headlines from feeds that you have
selected will refresh. Examples of popular web-based
RSS aggregators are: SurfPack - http://www.surfpack.com
, FeedScout - http://www.feedscout.com
or ActiveWeb Reader - http://www.deskshare.com/awr.aspx
. My.Yahoo even has the option of including RSS feeds
on My.Yahoo start pages.
Plug-in Readers
Plug-in news aggregators expand the functionality of
existing applications to allow users to veiw RSS feeds
from within an existing program. Some plug-ins work
with web browsers; others work with e-mail clients.
An example of a plugin is: NewsGator Outlook - http://www.newsgator.com/outlook.aspx
Websites containing RSS feeds usually have a colorful
graphic indicating the availability of an RSS feed.
The graphic is usually marked 'RSS' or 'XML'. Simply
click the graphic and enter the URL of the file into
the reader. Regardless of the RSS reader or news aggregator
used by web surfers, the process of adding feeds is
generally simple. Web surfers need only to enter the
URL of the RSS feed that they wish to view into their
news reader. Each time the reader refreshes the feed
the information contained within the feed is updated
and new content in the feed will appear in the RSS reader.
Finding Feeds
In order to find topic-specific feeds, conduct a
search on the RSS search engines available at RSS Specifications
- http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-directory.htm
or try RSS Locator - http://www.rss-locator.com
.
About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com
software for creating, editing and publishing RSS feeds
and NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net
a wireless messaging software company.
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copy of the issue or a link to any online posting would
be greatly appreciated send an email to sharon@notepage.net
.
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