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What is RSS?
By Ian Baaske, NSLS

 

RSS is a standardized way for websites to broadcast to the world that their content has been updated. But, like a carburetor in a car, what it is is much less important than what it does. What it does is allow you to keep tabs on the newest information from dozens of different web sites all in a single place.

How Do I Use It?

A piece of software called an "aggregator"or a "news reader" keeps track of all the feeds to which you subscribe. It shows you which ones have new content and what that new content is.

For example, here's how the aggregator called Feed Demon would look, subscribed to several NSLS RSS feeds:

On the left-hand side are all the feeds to which you're subscribed. On the right-hand side is the content from each one. You are then able to click through each feed, view what's new, and determine what was interesting to you without having to visit each individual site.

Unfortunately, Feed Demon isn't free. But, it's just one of a large number of web-based and desktop applications that parse and display RSS. Unlike web browsers, there's no "standard" aggregators. Usage is split between a number of different products.

What's the Best Way To Get Started?

One of the easiest ways to play around with aggregators is to start using a free web-based aggregator called "Bloglines."

Once you have registered for an account and logged in, you'll see a screen that looks something like this:

Your feeds will be on the left-hand side and the content will be on the right. Click "Add" in the upper left-hand portion to get to this screen:

Copy and paste the URL to an RSS feed. (For this example, I used the feed from Mindy Wallis's Off Kilter blog.) Click "Subscribe." A second page will come up, listing different subscription options. Click "Subscribe" again.

Voila! I'm subscribed. Bloglines has a number of advanced features that make it even easier. There is a notifier you can download and a button you can add to your browser's toolbar to easily subscribe as you browse the web.

Where Do I Find the URL to an RSS Feed?

Unfortunately, there’s no standard way to display RSS feeds. Some have a little orange icon []. Some say “RSS”; some use “Feed”; some use “Syndicate This Site”. Below are screenshots from The New York Review of Books, Flickr, Google News, Slate, and Slashdot: all excellent sites, all advertising their RSS feeds quite differently.

On our NSLS blogs, it's in the lower-left hand corner and it says "Syndicate This Site":

Once you find the link and click on it, you'll discover that, by itself, it's quite useless:

That's alright because your aggregator knows what to do. All you'll need to do is copy and paste the URL.

What is OPML?

Finally, there's something called "OPML," which is a collection of RSS feeds. NSLS offers an OPML listing of all of its blogs. To add it to your Bloglines account, first right-click here (CTRL-click for Macs) and save this file to your desktop. Go to Bloglines and click on the "My Feeds" tab and then "Edit" below that. Click "Import Subscriptions." On the right-hand side, browse to the .opml file you just saved. Click "Import." You should receive a notification that it worked:

Happy reading!

 

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