What is RSS, and what is it for?
I am trying to increase my readership on my blog and I thought to add a “follow me on facebook/twitter” button to my home page or perhaps a “share” and “like” button to the bottom of every post. I’ve noticed that a lot of blogs that I follow have a “RSS” or “Subscribe” button which I don’t altogether understand. I know that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication but I’m not sure what it does or how it would benefit my site if I chose to add it. When I click on most RSS buttons on other sites I get a screen of text and code. What is it for?
You can download a program called an “RSS reader”. It then automatically downloads RSS feeds from all the sites that you have configured it to subscribe to. Then you see a list of news stories and blog entries from all the different sites that you subscribe to, all in one place. So for example I could see news stories and blogs from CNN, wired.com and a dozen other sites and blogs all on the same screen, without visiting each individual site. Then I would skim through the headlines and click on the stories and entries that interest me. The purpose of RSS is that this saves you a lot of time as opposed to visiting the individual sites.
To better understand the concept you can also try out Google Reader, it’s a browser based RSS reader so it won’t require you to download any programs onto your desktop.
If your blog is on blogspot or any other blog hosting service it should automatically have an RSS feed built in and normally you shouldn’t have to do anything to make RSS available on your blog. If you don’t, your easiest option for adding an RSS feed would be to move it over to a hosting place that takes care of this automatically.
The way to subscribe to a blog’s RSS feed it to copy the URL that is linked to with the RSS button,. Then go into your RSS reader, find the option for adding a feed, and paste the URL into the appropriate place.
|
|
“Twitter Marketing Made Easy” $0.50 |
|
|
ALL A TWITTER – TEE MORRIS (PAPERBACK) NEW $17.31 |
|
|
Twitter Advertising to 65,800+ Followers $60.00 |
|
|
Caravan Humorous Decal – Twitter $8.63 |
|
|
Cash In FAT $997 Checks From Your ‘Idle Time’ On Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn! $9.97 |
Tags: social, tools, twitter, twitter share button code, twitter share button html code, web2.0, webdesign