Boonage

I believe most of you all had seen what is shown on the image on mostly all of the website on the Internet nowadays. In case you don’t know, it is actually what we call RSS Feed, where RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Quite a number of my friends ask me about it and wanted to know what does it do and what is the benefits of using it. So i decided to write about it in simple understanding terms

**Note** - again this is only using simple understanding terms, those who know about it can actually just skip it

I am not going to talk about the grandmother story and history of a RSS Feed, and also doesn’t want to touch on how to actually write it. Basically it is an XML file. If you want to know more about it you could simply google it or find the full explanation on wikipedia ;).

A RSS Feed actually holds the data either the summary or the full content of the updates on the website that provide it. Each time that particular website update the content, the RSS feed which grab the data from it and display it to you if you subscribe on it. Picture explanation in figure 1

However, the RSS Feed itself is just a raw XML file where it needs a Feed Reader to translate the XML data to be display in an understandable reading text and some with pictures. Just like a mp3 player is needed to play the mp3 file in order to listen to the mp3’s song. In this case, the Feed Reader is the mp3 player, while the RSS Feed is the mp3 file and the Feed Content is the mp3’s song. Picture explanation in figure 2

Now, where to find this Feed Reader. There’s actually quite a number of Feed Reader out there on the Internet. Among the popular readers, i recommend this two reader, which is : Google Reader and Netvibes.

How to use Feed Reader
For Google Reader, if you don’t have a google account, then go register one. If you have it then just use your google account to login. Once you’d login you will see something like what’s shown below

As for Netvibes, same thing you will have to register. And after registered u will have the page shown as below

Then go to the page where you want to subscribe the RSS feed, usually is shown with the standard RSS icon which is shown like below

Click on the icon and it will bring you to a page showing the content of the feed. This page’s display might be different for certain websites, this would pretty much depend on what kind of Feed they use (this you wouldn’t need to worry much for now)

If the feed content page you saw these few icons shown below, these represent the readers. If you happen to found the reader which you are using, in this case Google Reader simply just click on it and you will be brought to the Google Reader page with the RSS Feed of that page being automatically subscribed, same goes to the Netvibes. And if you happen to see these icon before you click on the RSS icon (some website provide these link icon right on their main page), you can do the same thing

If you did not see those link icons, or the website doesn’t provides it, you just copy the URL of the feed content page. Then head on to your Feed Reader.
For Google Reader, click on the Add Subscription which is on the top left side, and paste the URL on it then hit “Add”, shown as below

For Netvibes, click on the Add a Feed which is on the top most left side, paste the URL on it then hit “Add”, shown as below

Repeat the same thing to on the RSS Feeds from other websites.

What’s the benefits for the user who use the RSS Feed. Well, the major benefit would be you no need to visit their website everytime to find out whether they had their content update or not. Simply just refer to your Feed Reader to find out whether that website had did any update or not. You may say it has no difference to find out from your Feed Reader and going to the website and check for update, but when your interest of websites reading increase and your Feed Reader’s RSS Feed increased, you will know the difference!

Hope this will help clear things up for those who doesn’t have any idea on RSS Feed, anything unclear please do ask me and if i missed out anything, please do inform me through the “commment” so that other reader could see things that i missed as well