An Introduction About RSS Document

An RSS document is made up of ‘items’, comprising a title, a link to the content and a description of that item. For instance, for a news article, the title will be like a headline, the link will take readers to the news article and the description will summarize the news they’ll find on clicking the link to visit your site. The items are grouped into a ‘channel’ or ‘feed’. This is the name you assign to your ongoing series of RSS documents.

RSS documents are created in XML, or Extensible Markup Language, which is fast becoming the markup language for the Web. HTML tags instruct the browser how to display content (fonts, images or otherwise); XML tags define the nature of the information.

The XML file can be updated manually or by using modules to increase the speed of the process. The feed is prepared by transforming the RSS file into HTML. A scripting command named server-side include is used to place the content on the Web page as a template. Once the module has been developed, it’s really just a matter of sitting back and letting the content stream in.

The files can be accessed from our own Web site or by registering our feed with content aggregators, or sites that list various feeds. Individual RSS readers can subscribe directly to our feeds through these options. Other Web sites can also do the same, bringing more hits to our content. And we, as a content manager, can subscribe to other sites’ or aggregators’ feeds as well. This will provide our site visitors with news and material that we may not have the time to develop.

Briefly About RSS

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a very cost effective method to bring your information to your clients and ‘to-be-clients’. It is a viable alternative to produce effective solutions to your numerous business needs. RSS has a lot of advantages over the other existing methods, to turn it into the most sought-after, powerful, influential tool, which will take over the Internet world very soon, if understood fully and properly. It is basically a ‘push-based’ communication method, which can be published and subscribed to easily. It can be explained as a file containing the latest information and accessed by subscribers who are interested.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It can be simply explained as a file containing the latest headlines, which can be published and subscribed to easily. Major players such as Macromedia, Macromedia, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and IDC have begun going in for RSS, not for just effective communication, but also for augmenting visibility of their websites, thus increasing traffic to their sites.

We can define RSS more technically as a lightweight, topical, metadata and syndication format.

• Lightweight. This is a very important feature looked upon by many users as one of the reasons to prefer RSS tool. RSS is very small, in the sense – it requires less space, usually less than a hundred kilobytes of space. RSS files are XML documents, which can be written using any text editor (Word, notepad, etc) very easily.
• Topical. RSS highlights what you think is important on your page and that would be the contents seen by the other readers. For example, if you are a news organization, you may want to focus on the latest headlines, if you are a businessman you may want to showcase about your products or if you are a publisher you may want to throw light on your latest book releases.
• Metadata. Metadata is the information about your data. You can embed details about your data in your RSS file. For example, who wrote the article you are highlighting or how often your RSS file will be read to see if you have added any information.
• Syndication. As we have already seen that it is to present a snapshot, in a specified formatted file, of what you consider most important about your site at the moment.