RSS explained

Imagine that you do a lot of web surfing. Every day you go to a favorite site to see what's new there, then to this other site, then another, etc. etc. ad nauseam. OK, you could open them all at once in tabs (at least you can in Firefox) but you still have to click on each one and read it. All of which can be quite a drag for us lazy 8T5th types! In a world where everything has to be done instantly, something called "RSS" can help.

"RSS" means "Really Simple Syndication". Unfortunately, this means nothing to most folks because the word "syndication" is somewhat American in origin. However, in the context of RSS, "syndication" means a collecting together of similar information - in this case, the said information is "what has changed on all your websites of interest?"

Many websites now have an hidden file called a "RSS feed" or "news feed". In this hidden file, diligent Webmasters keep a list of information items about the latest stuff on their site. For each item, there is a date, a title, a short description, a link to more information and, sometimes, even a picture. Older items are often removed, keeping the length of the list the same. (More about the number of items later).

You might ask, "if the feed file is hidden, how do I actually view it?"". The answer is, "you can't read it directly". This because the file itself is written in gobbledegook(XML). So you do have to have something on your computer, or access to something on-line that can read the file for you and present the list of items on your screen in a sane and sensible way. This "something" that I'm talking about is called, variously, a "reader" or, much worse, something like a "RSS feed aggregator" (only in America ;-). Also, the latest browsers can spot if a site has a feed and let you know somehow. In Firefox (currently the most popular browser) one of these appears in the address bar at the top of the page. Also you can often see one or both of these   somewhere on a page, along with an invitation to subscribe to a news feed or such-like. And on some sites, there are no icons or buttons but just some normal text and a link like "to subscribe to my wonderful site, click here".

In these days of irritatingly intrusive software that tries to guess your intentions, what happens when you click on a RSS icon, button or link depends on what you have on your computer and where you clicked. It's beyond the scope of this article to list all possible outcomes but, on my computer which has Firefox and a Google account, up comes a page which shows some information about the feed and it's URL (web address link) and an invitation to connect the feed either to my Google Home page (iGoogle) or Google's Reader.

I usually choose to put feeds on my Google Home page. For 8T5th stuff, we have our own Google account, and it's home page on my computer looks like this:



The two "widgets" shown are self-updating. Clicking on the plus sign shows you a bit of what's there, and clicking on the link to the right of the plus takes you to the relevant webpage. The Google page shown allows you to set the maximum no of items shown, by the way. Er, please don't try clicking on the links above, it's only an image ;-). If you want to try it out, head on over to here and click on the RSS button. I do hope that you haved gained some understanding of RSS here and look forward to any comments or questions.

Webmaster Ted