RSS

RSS

If youre trying to save up with news and content on multiple web sites, you're faced with the never ending task of visiting those sites to check for new content. Read on to learn about RSS and how it can deliver the content right to your digital doorstep.

In many ways, content upon the internet is beautifully linked together and accessible, but despite the interconnectivity of it all we still frequently locate ourselves visiting this site, then that site, then another site, all in an effort to check for updates and acquire the content we want. That's not particular efficient and there's a much better way to go about it.

Imagine if you will a simple hypothetical situation. Youa re a fan of a web comic, a few tech sites, an infrequently updated but excellent blog about an obscure music genre you're a fan of, and you like to keep an eye upon announcements from your favorite video game vendor.

If you rely upon manually visiting all those sitesand, allows be honest, our hypothetical example has a scant half-dozen sites while the average person would have many, many, morethen youre either going to be wasting a lot of time checking the sites all day for new content or youre going to be missing out upon content as you either forget to visit the sites or find the content after its not as useful or relevant to you.

RSS can crack you free from that cycle of either over-checking or under-finding content by delivering the content to you as it is published. Lets take a look at what RSS is how it can help.

What is the Rss

RSS may be one of the most underutilized but incredibly useful tools around. One of the easiest ways to envision RSS is that is is like a living bookmark file. Normally you bookmark a site and you have to go see in your bookmarks to click upon the site to profit new content. RSS is like bookmarking in that you flag the site to be used in the future, but instead of sitting statically in your bookmark folder, your RSS bookmark is an active entity that is constantly updating itself with new content from the saved source.

Historically, web sites mimicked analog mailing lists in order to deliver content. Material from the site gets packed up in a daily, weekly, or monthly digest, and fired off via email. For some content and perhaps for your particular reading style, email digests may be a perfect fit and theyre still in use by many web sitesif youre interested in getting daily email updated from Cyber Gist, for example, you can subscribe to the daily email here. If you desire to profit content as it is created and shared and in a format more flexible than an email digest, however, youll need RSS.

In 1999 very early implementation of RSS came along and shook up how content was delivered to site subscribers. Originally called RDF Site Summary (later renamed to Rich Site Summary and then Real Simple Syndication), the first incarnation of  RSS was the product of Netscape developers Dan Libby and Ramanathan V. Guha to serve as a content delivery system for the My.Netscape portal.

RSS allows web sites to shove out content in a standardized format commonly called a feed. This feed can be subscribed to by anyone with internet access and an appropriate tool called a feed reader. Accessing these RSS feeds is free and many popular and robust feed readers (which well chat about more in a moment) are also free.

To highlight the benefit of RSS, lets look at the three ways you could interact with Cyber Gist.

You could visit the web site in a traditional manner. To gain new content, videos, tutorials, and other material from Cyber Gist, you open your browser and visit Cyber Gists main page.  That's the way most people interact with most of the internet, by manually visiting web sites.

You could automate the process by subscribing to our email digest. Once a day you had gain an email from us with some summit stories and other content mixed in. Millions of people use email digests to get updates from web sites. Its not a bad solution and one that many people are comfortable with, but its not immediate or flexible.

Finally, you could subscribe to the main Cyber Gist RSS feed or one of the sub-feeds and the content would be delivered automatically and instantly, along with the content from any other web sites you have subscribed to, in your feed reader.

The last option really shines when youre also subscribing to multiple other sites. Instead of having to check our web site or just getting a single daily email with our content, all the articles from HTG are delivered along with every the other content youre interested in as one streamlined feed of news articles. Lets take a look at how that plays out in the real world.