Internet Technology Series: Get Your Site On Board with RSS
by Matt Wiseley, Technical Team Lead
08/30/2006
How Important is RSS Today?
While many Internet users don't know what RSS is or how it works, the tools they use to access the Internet increasingly do. Anyone who uses My Yahoo!, the Google Home Page, Microsoft's new Live.com home page, the Firefox browser, or Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 7 are likely to be using RSS - whether they know it or not. RSS is already a mainstream Internet technology and continues to gain traction as software developers release RSS-aware tools. Microsoft is making RSS support an important feature in Outlook 2007, Yahoo! now provides an RSS feed submission form and a categorized directory of RSS feeds, and RSS is a central technology making up the paradigm shift referred to as Web 2.0.
How Does RSS Work?
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (and there are variants, depending on who you ask). An RSS Feed is a specifically formatted XML file that users and their tools can download from a web site. Being XML, the file is easily readable by a broad range of tools, like mail programs, web browsers, dedicated RSS readers, and perhaps most importantly, other web sites. In the file is a dated list of resources available on the web site, each containing a title, description, and link.
For example, Boston.com provides a wide variety of RSS feeds. Each feed has a button to copy the feed link. Any tool that is RSS aware can use these URLs to provide an always up-to-date list of articles from Boston.com. Another button allows users to add a feed directly to their My Yahoo! home page.
A list of RSS feeds displayed at Boston.com
There are two main consumers of RSS: individual users and other web sites. Individuals use RSS to simplify their web browsing experience. Rather than visit several different web sites to check for updates, a user can collect RSS feeds from each site and quickly see only what's new from a single RSS reader - be it Firefox, Outlook, or any of the popular desktop feed readers available. Web sites use RSS to collect information from other web sites. Industry portals might use RSS to display recent press releases from key companies, and end-user portals like My Yahoo!, Google Home Page, and Microsoft Live provide feed reader functionality to their users on the web.
Get On Board
Here are some steps you can take to make the most of RSS on your site:
- Provide an RSS feed for any regularly updated section of your site, such as News and Press Releases. Use the orange RSS/XML icons to tell visitors about your feed.
Implement RSS auto-discovery so tools like web browsers can inform users of the feed and offer custom subscription methods. - Add a feed for your site's Careers section. Some job boards will subscribe to RSS feeds and syndicate your job posting for free.
- Include useful feeds from other sites on your site. Consider feeds from sites that visitors to your site might find useful.
- Make sure your RSS feeds are automatically updated when your site changes. If you use a content management system, the feed should be automatically generated by the CMS whenever changes are made.
Corporate web sites are too often outdated and stale. RSS and other Web 2.0 technologies provide an opportunity for corporate web sites to distinguish themselves from the pack, give users a reason to come back, and enable content aggregators to include their content automatically. Don't get left in the dust - contact us today to find out what an RSS-enabled content management system from Embarc can do for your web site.
