What is RSS?

With the explosion of Blog sites, the term ‘RSS’ seems to be all over the place on all the sites along with those odd orange bars and yet here seems to be no explanation for them!

I’m here to help!

What does RSS mean?

The definition of RSS is: Really Simple Syndication.

Wow, that explains everything!

…or not

What it actually does is bundle the info people have written in their blog into a feed that we can view independent of the site styling. It breaks down the actual information in the blog so you can read it with no distractions.

Let me demonstrate by looking at this site – my sketchbook site.

I hope you find it pretty – but it’s not al needed to get to the info within my blog.

This is an ordinary Blog site that has an RSS feed.

Now, notice the RSS button in the address bar or that RSS with the orange icon in the side bar on the right.

This is the RSS link in the address bar - depending on what browser you're using, this link may look different

This is the RSS link in the right hand sidebar

If you press it, you get a new version of the site without the clutter of the interface – isn’t that wonderful?!

This is the beautiful RSS version of the Craig's Sketchpad site

Well, no, I’l have to agree with you on that, it’s somewhat dull and boring!

Fortunately that’s not the good bit! This is…

If you bookmark that RSS page in your browser – the boring looking page, it’ll tell you when the site is updated by displaying a number next to the bookmark link (so it’s handy to keep RSS links bookmarked in the toolbar so you can easily see the update alert). The number next to the bookmark is how many updates/new posts there’ve been since you last looked at the site.

This is the alert in the bookmark bar displaying the amount of unread RSS entries

If you’ve bookmarked many RSS feeds in a folder in your browser, you’ll have the total updates for all the RSS feeds next to the bookmark folder.

That is the beauty of RSS feeds – you never have to randomly go to sites to see if they’ve been updated – the feed lets you know!