Feeds - RSS
March 4th, 2007 — Vyoma“What are those orange icons?”
Feeds, and more commonly RSS and Atom, are used at blogs, news sites and just about any website that has got frequently updated content. They are usually shown at the home page or through out the website as an orange icon. It lets the users or visitors of the site know about the udpates to the site without actually visiting the site. In some cases, the full content and not just the summary is provided through these Feeds.
Splat and WiseTome too has these feed icons, that lets you subscribe to the feeds using a Feed Reader of your choice. Splat and WiseTome provides RSS feeds.
RSS, the abbreviation, is used to refer any of the following standards:
- RDF Site Summary
- Rich Site Summary
- Really Simple Syndication
The above are the various different versions of RSS.
The first version, RDF Site Summary, was created by Ramanathan V Guha when he was working at Netscape for use at the Netscape portal. Later Dan Libby created the Rich Site Summary, the next versions of RSS. And later, around the end of 2002, RSS 2.0 or the Really Simple Syndication came into use, after a lot of fuss over the conformance and the validations that a RSS file had to undergo.
A RSS file is basically an XML file that gets generated or created as and when new content is updated to a site. The software or the Content Management System that updates the site with the new content also updates this file to include the links and summaries to it, and remove the older ones.
The website would always maintain an updated RSS file, and with all the visitors/readers of the site who have subscribed would know about it since their feed reader would fetch this latest RSS file for them. This saves the trouble for visitors/readers to constantly check their websites for updates. Once they come to know of the updates from their Feed Reader, they have the choice of visiting the website to further interact, and in some cases read the full content.
In the next posts, we will learn something more on the now ubiquitous feed icon and also about different types of Feed Readers that lets you subscribe to different feeds.