s1170162 How RSS Works

1. How RSS Works
1. Introduction
2. What is RSS
3. RSS Reader
4. Creating RSS Feeds
5. More Links

2. 1. Introduction
The trouble with living in the Information Age is
paradoxical: There's too much information. It's
everywhere. How are you supposed to keep
track of all the news, sports, weather and blogs
you follow? If these are not distinguished, it is
not very efficient to find appropriate
information. Better yet, how are you going to do
that and find time for work, school and family?

3. 2. What is RSS
If you're addicted to the constant flow of data that we
know as the Internet, you're not going to be able to
manage it without some help. RSS is a way to
subscribe to a source of information, such as a Web
site, and get brief updates delivered to you.
Lots of sites that publish regular information have
their own RSS feeds, like Marshall Brain's
BrainStuff weblog.
This lets you scan the articles
on the page more efficiently.

4. 3. RSS Reader
Reading feeds requires a few simple things. You'll need
a computer and an Internet connection. After that,
aggregators collect and interpret RSS feeds in one
location. Aggregators will give you help you enjoy your
reading by you need phenomenon.
Aggregators take many forms. When you see a website,
you'll probably see the square orange logo that
indicates the presence of an RSS feed. So you may
even see a link with a whole list of feeds.

5. 4. Creating RSS Feeds
RSS isn't really that different from a normal Web site. In
fact, they're the same in one respect. RSS uses the World
Wide Web Consortium's Resource Description
Framework (RDF) as a guide to tell a feed aggregator how
to read the file. RDF is based on extensible markup
language (XML).
RSS tags also include the name of the creator of the feed,
the date it was published. So what happens if you want
to add an RSS feed to your existing blog? News
organizations and other Web sites that publish with their
own proprietary systems have to build RSS into their
Web code.

6. 5. More Links
How Stuffs Works RSS Feeds
( http://computer.howstuffworks.com/rss-feeds.html )
List of Feed Reader
(http://www.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=rss.h
tm&url=http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Intern
et/Clients/WWW/Feed_Readers/ )
RSS 2.0 at Harvard Law
(http://www.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=rss.ht
m&url=http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html )