RSS - An idiots guide to the mystery held within

So you've seen this term RSS branded about, you've even seen the little yellow XML or blue RSS logos dotted on various places. Even your browser is now popping up icons as you visit sites telling you to subscribe to the sites feed. But what on earth does it all mean?

Before we go into the world of RSS and what it can offer let's step back a moment. Since you are reading this article, we can assume then you are comfortable with using a browser to read pages on the Internet. You click on a link and are taken to that page. A fairly simple transaction.

Now, let us assume you always go to say the BBC News site. This is a site you visit often to get the latest news or sports scores. You may visit this site a few times a day to see if the information has been updated. If it has, then you can take some time to read the bits that interest you, ignoring the rest. But what if you didn't have to visit the site to see if something has changed. What if something could check for you and let you know when something has changed for you.

You could save yourself a huge amount of time and idle clicking around looking for fresh content. Imagine if there was a program that would monitor all the sites you usually visit, and then let you know when something new popped up. Even better, when something new did pop-up, it would direct you straight to that new page or story.

Sound good?

Well this is exactly the type of service that RSS feeds allows to exist.

In this world, the program that monitors for site changes is often referred to as an RSS reader. There are many different applications, for all the operating systems available. With the latest browsers (FireFox, IE7, Opera), an RSS reader is built in. But we'll come back to that in a minute.

So these RSS readers will monitor a site for changes and additions. But the question is how? How do they do that? Do they go to the site and read the page and then compare it to the last time? Well in a way, yes they do. But instead of looking at the pretty visual HTML page that you and I see, they don't need all the fancy graphics, colours or fonts. Instead they just need to see the raw data - the words. So to make this easier (and quicker) for computer programs to detect changes, they use a different standard, called the RSS format.

This RSS format contains all the data for the site, but in a format that is known as XML. This is the data that RSS readers like to consume so they can easily determine if a site has changed or added data.

So let us go back to the web browsers.

Browsers can now automatically detect whether or not a site has an RSS feed associated with it by looking at the top of the HTML page. If a site does, then they will display a small orange logo, that you can then click on and this effectively bookmarks the site. But it is a special bookmark. The browser will automatically keep an eye on the site for you and when a new item appears it will alert you to this, depending on the browser.

That is the secret behind RSS; it is a means by which users can remotely monitor your blog without the need to continually visit just on the off-chance you have added something.

tags: feeds  rss  blog help