How Did RSS Changed The Way We Surf The Web?

First, we have to know what RSS stands for… In March 1999, the first version of RSS was invented by Guha at Netscape. This version is known as RSS 0. 9 and it’s a short for RDF Site Summary. Later, in July 2003, Winer and UserLand Software introduced RSS 2.0. When we are talking about RSS today, we are talking about the version 2. 0 that is most commonly expanded as “Really Simple Syndication”"Really Simple Syndication”. RSS is a really great innovation strategy. It can be very usefull if you visit some Internet sites that are updated weekly or daily. By using this great technology you can surf the web more effeciently because instead of going to each web sites one at a time, RSS enables you to receive updated posts or web pages all in one area of what we call a reader. There are many RSS readers available out there… Here are some cool readers that I would highly recommend:

1. BeanRocket
2. Greensboro101.com
3. NewsOnFeeds

With this technology innovation you can never miss what you’re looking for. You can also install your reader on a mobile device such as a Iphone. So, you can be updated of new content wherever you go… Here is a short video that describes the basics of RSS and it also explain how the readers get the work done for you. Basically, what you need to do to get in the game: install the RSS reader and subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds.

How does this information travel? The source of info is a feed. When you subscribe to a feed, you will receive a series of headlines with a short description of every new articles published on this web page. By browsing through those, you can select the articles that grab you interest and get your information without wasting any of your precious time. Some browsers automatically detect when you can subscribe to a RSS feed on a web page. Firefox and Opera, for example, will show you the RSS logo when they find a feed. If you are using other browsers, you have to look for the orange square with a white dot and a little arc that represent the diffusion of the information.

How to create RSS feeds? It not really complicated if you know the basics of html programming. If you have a normal web site, you can add the RSS feature in a flick of a switch. If you are using Drupal or Wordpress to build your web site, there are many widgets available that will automatically integrate the RSS function to your posts. RSS uses RDF as a guide to tell a feed reader how to read the file. RDF stands for Resource Description Framework. RDF is based on XML. XML is a programming language really similar to HTML. XML stands for extensible markup language and HTML stands for hypertext markup language. HTML is the language used by all the Web Sites. When you start using XML and RDF, it enables you to add new interesting features to your sites. When you install the widget to your web site, it will add the RSS tags into the html code so the feed readers can spot your headlines and the beginning of your articles. This work can also be done manually, but you will have to put much more time.
Knowing all that now, you should be able to get your information in a new and improved way because of this great modern technology.