May 4th, 2011
RSS Feeds…What Exactly Are They?
Chances are, you have seen this symbol on the left before. It’s always orange, and quite commonly found on blogs and news sites — anything that gets updated regularly. The symbol is often placed at the bottom of the page or on a sidebar — most likely next to the ever-so-popular Facebook and Twitter icons. When you click on the orange symbol to the left, you usually arrive at a “feed://” address as opposed to a “http://” address, and come to a page displaying a number of articles from your blog/news site of choice. This is what we call an RSS content feed— or to be precise, a Really Simple Syndication feed.
As a Denver website development company, we can attest to how useful RSS feeds are. RSS feeds allow internet users to view timely updates from their favorite blogs and other sites all in one place, with the help of an RSS feeder. RSS feeders include tools such as Google Reader. On a site like Google Reader, the user can add as many “subscriptions” (RSS content feeds) as they want. The subscriptions each user chooses are placed in a neat little column, and are updated with content as fast as possible, so that the user can see if each RSS content feed has new posts. This makes reading multiple blogs every day a whole lot easier than, say, keeping a Bookmark or Favorites folder of your preferred news sites and blogs to peruse on a daily basis.
Did we mention that RSS feeds generally come automatically with blogs set up on sites like WordPress and Blogger? It’s easy to let anyone who enjoys reading your blog entries “subscribe” to your blog via RSS. Being a Denver WordPress Developer, we can’t tell you how important this is — it’s all about reader loyalty and blog accessibility! RSS feeds are certainly a tool for building readership — something we will get into in the next couple of weeks here.
Stay tuned for next Wednesday’s post: some background information on the history of RSS feeds, when they were invented, and a little more on how they work.
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[...] You’re probably wondering about this Netscape icon over here on the left. It seems like most people these days are fans of Mozilla, Safari, Google Chrome, or something along those lines…however, remember those RSS feeds we talked about last week? [...]
Pingback by The Story Behind RSS Feeds | Chris Strom, LLC — May 11, 2011 @ 9:20 pm