Quick Link RSS
Using RSS feeds within your blog
Let us attempt to take away some of the confusion around the RSS world by looking at it from another angle - instead of producing RSS feeds with your blog, how about consuming or reading them.
In its simplest form, you can think of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as just a list of latest items. Formatted in a special way to make it easier for computers to interpret. For example, when you and I read a page of information we like to see formatting, fonts, layout, pictures and even colours in some instances. For a computer, they don't see any of this, they just want the words, the raw data. RSS enables this. Just keep telling yourself, it's not meant to be read by humans; only computers.
Right out of the box, your blog produces a variety of RSS feeds based on what you are writing, for other computers to easily consume and utilise. But what can you do with an RSS feed on your blog?
You want to think of your readers when you are thinking of consuming RSS feeds. You could take an RSS feed from say a news source, and display the latest headlines on your blog for your readers to see while they were visiting your blog.
For example, take a look at the open source news/toys blog over at http://compiledby.spikesource.com/. Look at how the home page contains more than just the entries composed by that author. It also contains the latest headlines from a variety of sources from around the Internet.
This way when the user visits the blog, then can also get a good round up of the things happening in other places. You have become your own mini-aggregator - bringing together related pieces of information in one place. This may even encourage the reader to come back to your blog as a jumping off point as they know it is a place to find good links.
The content the RSS feed will change content automatically depending on when the source updates their entries. This way your blog is always displaying something different for both you and your readers to enjoy.
Additionally, Blog-City blogs give you an overview landing page for all the feeds you are currently tracking. For example, here Alan Williamson's blog is tracking various Java related news sources and he can see them all here: http://alan.blog-city.com/newsfeed/.
One thing you may have noticed with these examples, is how the data from the RSS feed looks. Note how all the data is presented in the look'n'feel of the blog that is hosting it. This is the power of RSS; it is pure data, with no (or little) formatting imposed on it.
You are not limited to consuming RSS feeds from the major news sources; you can use any RSS feed, including your best friends blog feed. You can place their latest entries in your gutter, so your readers can see your friends entries, and maybe you can persuade them to place your feed in their gutter. Instead of swapping dead-lifeless links, swap RSS feeds instead. An example of this can be seen at the Blog-City support blog, that uses this blogs RSS feed in their gutter. So anytime this blog produces content, their blog is updated automatically to reflect the latest entries.
Be careful how you include RSS feeds into your blog. There are many Javascript snippets that you can easily cut'n'paste and drop into your blog. While this looks to do the same, all the links are blind to the search engines, and therefore you won't benefit from the likes of Google's page rank scheme. Blog-City does not utilise Javascript for this very reason.
You can get involved with RSS feeds more than just simply the production of them. Reading them gives you a window into the world that interests you, all without having to worrying about the logistics.
