‘What the hell is Blogging?’: RSS Explained
Welcome to episode 1 of ‘What the Hell is Blogging?‘ titled:
RSS Explained
RSS [Really Simple Syndication] is quite simple , yet seems confusing, and if you do not understand it then you should toss your computer out the window or smash it up Office Space style…cause dude..your screwed.
OK, stop unplugging you computer and keep reading. There is no need for any defenestration just yet. I may be able to explain it to you in one of my usually funny, but this time boring similes:
You are a news junkie. You need to get all of your worldwide news and current events. If you don’t get your dose of daily news you start to get the shakes, as if you had drank and entire case of Red Bull. So to make sure that you do not end up looking like a heroine addict doing the junkie jig you call up your local newspaper and ask them to deliver the paper to your house every day.
An RSS Feed is basically like a paper boy bringing the news to your house. Except it is much more powerful. Rss is more like having an army of paper boys (John Cusack’s nightmare ) bring you every news paper from around the world right to your door step.
With RSS you are not limited to the news, you can basically get an RSS feed for any topic you can think of. Of course you will need to get a feed reader, which is basically a program or website that manages your in coming ‘newspapers.’ I myself use www.bloglines.com. In some cases you can also subscribe to an RSS feed via email, and have everything delivered directly to your inbox.
Move your eyes to the top right hand side of this page and subscribe to the Dork and Beans RSS feed now. It’s easier to keep up with us that way!
If my ‘RSS explained‘ ramblings just don’t quite do it for you, then I suggest you head to Wikipedia for a few more answers, plus you can also download a free ebook called Easy RSS Profits which covers RSS in more detail than I have explained here.
Those of you that are blogging masters please feel free to share your expertise on RSS in the comment section
Jun 24th, 2008 at 12:03 am
You should give Newzie a try. It will have you reading 10 times the number of feeds in a fraction of the time.
“neeed innnnpuuuut!”
I would describe RSS more like having a bunch of friends that in the past you had to go to each one’s house to visit them to catch up on everything and possibly making a trip for nothing, because there might not be anything new to catch up on…but now they all come to your house at the same time to spill it all, whenever they have the slightest bit of news to tell.
So instead of wasting your time wandering around the web clicking all your bookmarks to check and see if your favorite sites and blogs have anything new, you open your RSS reader and it’s all there in one place, if there is anything new.
Jun 25th, 2008 at 4:51 am
app, good analogy, but mine had an awesome side note video which made it cool.
Actually yours prolly made more sense (and pence, gold muhr and frankincense)
Jun 25th, 2008 at 5:30 am
You will have to excuse me for not noticing the cool video as I am currently stuck on an 11 year old PC (233mhz, 64mb, 2mb onboard gfx) on 33.6k dialup that can’t do video.
I’ll be sure to watch as soon as I can fix my time machine and return to the 21st century.