Ok so how am I now going to bring breakdancing into this article as well as bookmarks? Read on and you will see I havent gone completely bonkers…
I have often been asked what RSS is, and the answer is Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. To be honest even the name of it sounds slightly more technical and complicated than it really is.
RSS files are formed as XML files and are designed to provide content summaries of news, blogs, forums or website content. That’s the techy bit in a nutshell but what you may ask is ‘does it have any value for you’?
RSS users can select the RSS feeds (content) they wish to subscribe to. The rss feeds are usually just simple headlines and brief descriptions and if the user (reader) is interested they can click to view further information. The rss feeds are in fact very popular and used by millions all over the world.
The reason that RSS is so popular is that it can save you countless hours of time searching your favourite sites for the content that tickles your taste buds. You no longer have to store 100+ bookmarks of your favourite websites and open them all to read the most suitable content, you now have more time to go running, take up break dancing or go zorbing!! (see what I did there..)
Although a lot of people may subscribe to certain feeds this doesn’t always guarantee that they will read the articles within them. In most cases subscribers of rss feeds (including me) usually subscribe to lots of feeds which are of similar content. Due to this reason a user cannot read all the content so will usually carefully select and prioritise by the title and then browse the first couple of lines to see if the article is of interest to them. I think at this point you may realise when writing how important it it that you get your title right and your opening paragraph captures the essence of what your article is about.
Any other comments or opinions on rss feeds is welcome otherwise happy breakdancing!!
Zak
