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This article follows up on the Lunchtime Technology Taster from 6th February 2007 at the Institute of Education. It provides a quick introduction to working with RSS feeds, including links to further information.

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Contact the author: Tim Neumann 

RSS and Syndication

One of the challenges of contemporary web use is the task of monitoring new additions to websites. Usually you are constantly discovering new interesting sites, but do you actually return to every single one of them to check for news? This can occupy you for hours!

Instead, there is a technology based on a subscription model: You decide which website you want to monitor, and you get updates delivered to you by various means. Updates from multiple sites can be compiled in one single space, be it a single web page, an email-client-style application, or an email client such as Outlook itself.

This is what RSS does. Or what you are doing, when you are syndicating the web.

Definition

The abbreviation RSS usually stands for Really Simple Syndication, although some people may call it Rich Site Summary or similar.

RSS is a technical standard based on XML, which is a markup language, just as HTML is a markup language. That means you need an application that understands the language and interprets it correctly. Thus, to work with RSS, you need an RSS reader, which displays RSS feeds:

• RSS Feed:
  The feed is usually created automatically by a content management system. It contains a list of articles that have recently been added to the website. The first part of the article text, usually just a few sentences, is included in the feed, as well as a hyperlink to the full article.
  RSS feeds are based on XML
  
• RSS Reader or Aggregator:
  An Aggregator is a software application that reads RSS feeds. The user specifies which feeds should be monitored, and the aggregator downloads these feeds in regular intervals, similar to regular email checks. The content of the feed, for example article titles with the first bit of text, is then displayed together with a hyperlink that leads to the relevant article page.
  Aggregators often display RSS feeds in a similar way as email clients display email folders and messages. The true benefit of RSS aggregators is  the fact that they can download feeds from multiple websites in one single operation. The user can thus see the latest articles from a number of websites in a single window. This process is usually called syndication.

Information on selecting aggregators follows on the next page.