It has come to my attention that only 10% of the internet knows what an RSS feed is. So, as defined by wikipedia:
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.
Ok, so example-wise:
- When I finish writing this blog post, my RSS feed will be updated. You can view the updated feed here.
- This in turn will update the people subscribed to the feed.
- There are many ways of subscribing to feeds the most common ones include: Outlook or other email clients, web browsers, Apple widgets, Windows gadgets, online applications, and even mobile phones.
I’ll write a continuation to this blog post with a tutorial on adding a feed to outlook.
An RSS follows the XML definition, XML is a markup language. Markup languages are used to encapsulate data. So the information encapsulated in RSS tags will commonly be a title, a decription, a date, and a link, but RSS feeds such as this blog’s include more information. Examples of RSS feeds that hold other types of information are Podcasts; they hold links to videos.
Finally, RSS feeds are denoted by this icon and its orange color:
The RSS official icon.
