strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Feb 12 04: hey, what's rss?
Right. Terribly pretentious of me. Sorry.
RSS stands for Rich Site Summary, or more popularly Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a way for you, and people just like you, to keep track of the huge quantities of data being added to the internet every day, and to easily find out about new entries of potential interest without having to visit your favorite sites over and over each day.
An RSS feed is a file maintained on a webserver. This file contains summaries of the articles published on that server. The articles may be blog entries (as is the case here); or they may be news articles, divided into various categories (as is offered by the BBC News); or they may be lists of the latest exciting items offered for sale in your favorite categories (as is offered by Amazon). There are three different formats in which the file may be encoded: RSS 1.0 and 2.0, and Atom.
How do you, the end-user, make use of an RSS feed? With a program called an aggregator, also known as a newsreader. The aggregator works something like a web browser, only it reads RSS-encoded files instead of web pages (which are encoded in HTML). You give your aggregator the address of any feed to which you want to subscribe. The program quickly downloads the feed to your computer, highlighting any entries you haven’t seen before. You can read summaries of these entries using the aggregator itself—and if you want to read the whole thing, you just click a link onscreen in the aggregator and it opens a browser window to whatever you’ve clicked on. The aggregator can be set to refresh its subscribed feeds at whatever interval you desire.
If you want to know more: the BBC’s summary is nice; Google maintains a huge list of aggregators for all platforms (I like NetNewsWire, myself, and eventually I may even upgrade to the version you have to pay for); Mac users can get a more Mac-specific introduction from MacCentral. Finally, there’s a whole controversy swirling around RSS and Atom that I haven’t discussed here. Don’t worry about it for now.
How’s that?
Commentary
Sweetness - am no longer able to read blog in Internet Explorer - navigation bar has mysteriously moved on top of text.
I know I know - when I get my mac - this won’t be an issue.
But I do read your blog at work…
posted by Sari, Feb 16 04 1:18 PM
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