Serasi

There are two parts to RSS feeds:

- The feed itself, that is to say the content that you have created on your website or blog.

- The RSS/news aggregator, which pulls these feeds together and brings them together as a single page.

Content can mean audio, video, images or text.

In it’s simplest form, RSS feeds work like this:

- Someone visits your website, loves your content and wants to know when you’ve written new pages.

- They subscribe to the RSS feed on your website

- Every time you produce new content, without you having to do a thing, that person gets an automatic update of that new content

RSS feeds are a great tool to use on your website because:

- It takes the content to the user, rather than them having to go looking for it

- It encourages website loyalty = return customers = more chances for monetization

- It allows you to incorporate your content into cool widgets which use the system. Cool widgets = more site attention = more chances for monetization

Before you decide to use RSS on your website, you need to be sure that it’s right for you.

If you seldom update your website, don’t bother using it.

People subscribe to feeds because they expect regular updates and they don’t want to miss them.

However, if you’re creating a content rich website then RSS is definitely something you should use.

Generally, you should look for a web creation service which has RSS built in.

All the popular blog software like Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad integrate the system and blogging - along with podcasting - is probably the biggest user of this technology.

Many content management systems - like Mambo and Joomla - have it built in too, so every time you save and publish a page, it’s sent to your subscribers automatically.

There are four ‘techie’ words you should be aware of if you’re going to get into RSS.

Don’t worry too much about these, but I’ve offered brief explanations just so you know what’s going on if you see these terms referred to.

- Ping: In very simple terms a ‘ping’ is an alert that you’ve got new content on your site. It alerts aggregators and directories that your RSS feed has been updated.

- XML: Stands for Extensible Markup Language, but don’t worry about that yet! It’s a language, much like HTML, which is used for carrying data rather than displaying it. That makes it ideal for use with RSS.

- Permalink: This is a URL that points to a particular blog entry after it has moved from the front page to the archives. It’s a permanent reference for a particular page, one that won’t change.

- Trackback: Trackbacks are used mainly for communication between different blogs. If a blogger comments on or refers to an entry found on another blog, and Trackbacks are supported on both blogs, then the blogger who made the comment can notify the other blog with a “TrackBack ping”. The receiving blog will show a summary of the comments and will link to all the comments below the original entry.

Having made websites with and without RSS, I’m a firm convert.

Static websites without feeds aren’t a lot of good.

People like dynamic sites these days, and in the search engines, content rules, especially fresh, keyword-rich content.

So put it on your website shopping list, and when you’re working out what it is that you want from your hosting company or web creation software, be sure that Really Simple Syndication is part of your package.