What Is RSS

What Is RSS?

You may have been seeing those little orange RSS or XML buttons around the Internet. If you were wondering what they are...

"RSS" means "Really Simple Syndication." What it means to you is that when you subscribe to a site that has an RSS feed, you can keep up-to-date without having to check the site every day or week.

Whenever the site is updated your feed will be updated with the new page.

How do you get started? Here is how I do it - for free!

Go to
http://www.sitemapdoc.com/Default.aspx and follow the instructions for producing an RSS feed page on your site, probably called -
'http://www.your-site-name.com/myRSSFeed.xml'

Then go to
http://www.addthis.com/ and follow the instructions for producing the RSS feed button code which you can place anywhere you like on your site.

Lastly -
As well, or instead of a button on the page, you can to tell browsers that your page has an associated web feed. Do this by adding a link element inside the header of your web page. (between head and /head)

link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="your feed title here" href="http://www.your-site-name.com/myRSSFeed.xml"
(remember the angle brackets at either end)

Correct the 'title' to describe your site and fill in 'www.your-site-name.com' properly. And, you’ve finished.

Now, when a user goes to your web page, the "Web Feeds" button will light up. When the user clicks on the button, it will display the title that you put in the link element, and clicking on the title will navigate the user to preview the feed itself (which IE will render in a readable form in the browser - from there the user will be able to subscribe to your feed).

That's it - all done! The button below is what you will get.

Back to the top of this 'What Is RSS' page
Simple explanation of what RSS is and links to detailed information.