RSS - everyone should know this. What is RSS and why you should add an email subscription

Good day, dear readers. This article may not be relevant, but I thought it might be useful for some readers. We will talk about what RSS is and how to use it.

I would not like to go into technical details, I will try to be brief. RSS is a special format from the family of XML formats, with the help of which we can receive news from almost any site without visiting the site itself. For example, you like a website (blog), it is updated quite often, and some news that interests you is published on it every day.
To find out if something new has appeared on your favorite resource, you have to go to it and watch the updates. Agree that this is not entirely convenient.

So RSS serves to notify us about these news. There is no need to constantly visit your favorite site and refresh pages when you can simply receive a notification that the content of this site has been updated. Convenient, isn't it?

You may come across different terms on the Internet, for example, RSS channel, RSS feed, RSS feed or just feed, in fact, they are all the same thing. This is the name of sites that have an RSS format.

But in Blogspot Blogger blogs we come across a name like Atom. It is also part of the XML family of formats, but also includes a protocol based on HTTP. As you can see, it is this abbreviation http that is always present in website addresses, because... they are all transmitted using this protocol. The Atom format was invented later than the RSS format, and serves the same purposes.

The RSS format has its own icon, I'm sure you see it often, especially on blogs. This icon is a bright orange color, most likely to be noticeable so that users can immediately see that this site has an RSS feed to which they can subscribe. Of course, on the Internet you can find different interpretations of this icon, in different colors and different shapes, but for all icons the distinctive feature is this particular sign.

We can see the news feed in two different versions. The first is the regular XML format. Looks like that.

But more often, you can see the tape in this form.

This means that the feed has been passed through the FeedBurner service. You can read about its benefits and use in a series of articles. A feed passed through the FeedBurner service has a larger selection of different readers and services for reading feeds.

Subscription by email is also available. All these settings are made by the site owner to make the RSS feed more compatible with various applications, to obtain statistics on subscribers and much more.

How to use RSS

For our convenience, there is a huge selection to receive news from your favorite sites. Anything that helps us get updates is called an RSS aggregator. Almost all browsers have built-in RSS aggregators. An aggregator is also called a reader, RSS reader, or online client. Let's look at some of them.

You can receive site news directly in your browser. All modern browsers recognize sites that have an RSS feed. Typically, when you visit any website, if that website has an RSS feed, an orange RSS icon will appear in your browser's address bar or menu. If the site does not have an updated news feed, then such an icon is either absent or gray.

Look carefully, perhaps you have never even paid attention to it or simply haven’t thought about it. Let's see how to subscribe using this button. I decided to conduct experiments with the Habrahabr website, because... it is updated very often and you can quickly see the results of your subscription. So, you are on your favorite site.

In Internet Explorer, the subscription icon is located in the menu

We get to the channel page, in the upper left corner there will be a subscription link.

You can view updates by opening Favorites in the browser sidebar, tab Channels. Sites that have updates will be marked as unread.

In Mozilla Firefox the icon appears in the address bar

On the feed page, select from the drop-down list Bookmarks to news feeds

I personally don’t understand how updates come. Nothing has been updated in several hours :). If anyone knows, please share in the comments. Maybe I did something wrong.

What I like most about Opera is the subscription, although I practically never use it. The icon is displayed in the address bar; clicking on it takes you to a page on which all articles are already conveniently structured.

After subscribing, every time you open your browser, if there are updates in the feeds you subscribe to, an update message will appear in the lower right corner

In my opinion, the most convenient subscription is the ability to receive news quickly, conveniently, and without constantly going to the site itself.

Now we have looked at the options that the browsers themselves give us. But at the same time, not all browsers have been talked about yet. In principle, I wasn’t going to talk about everyone, but I wanted to pay attention to Chome from Google. The thing is, I haven't quite figured it out. So far I have found out that in order to subscribe, you need to install a special extension.

To do this, click on the icon Key - Tools – Extensions, a page with extensions will open, select RSS Subscription Extension (from Google). After installing this extension, the RSS icon will appear to the right of the address bar. But with the subscription itself, it turns out that you cannot receive news in the same way as, for example, offered in other browsers. And you need to select a specific RSS aggregator. By the way, all other browsers (except Internet Explorer) also give you the right to choose the program through which you will receive site news. And now we will look at the most common of them.

I won’t be mistaken if I name Google Reader and Yandex Feed among the most common ones. If your main mail is on one of these resources, then feel free to choose their applications for reading news feeds.

Google Reader has this icon
Yandex feed like this
You can view updates directly in their interface. Google always has a link to Reader in the top left corner of the mail page. Yandex updates will be visible in mail in the folder Subscriptions.

I would also like to say that Google offers to place subscription widgets on the iGoogle home page. I tried it, I didn’t really like it, because... news comes with a significant delay. It looks like this

It is not possible to list all online clients for reading feeds (RSS feeds). Let's take a better look at this option. For example, you are using some kind of reader, and when you go to the RSS feed page, among the options presented, you do not find your service. The solution is simple; you can add a feed to any reader yourself by simply copying it from the address bar of your browser. I won’t give examples, but if you look carefully, there is always a link Add channel Or something like that. It’s impossible to even imagine it simpler.

In addition to online clients for reading RSS feeds, there are also desktop programs. One of
The most interesting is the FeedReader program. The program is free, you can find out more by clicking on the link.

Now, with this knowledge, you can decide for yourself how it is most convenient for you to receive news from your favorite blogs and sites. I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out other online clients for reading RSS feeds, and there are a lot of them.

Take part in the action.
Among my regular readers there is a girl named Julia, the author of a blog whose topic causes a lot of controversy and emotions (at least for me), a blog about vegetarianism, Vegetarian on Beans. I will never become a vegetarian, and I consider this type of nutrition unnatural for humans, and yet, after reading several articles, I realized that you do not have to be a vegetarian to read this blog. The lively language and choice of topics for articles make the blog very interesting for everyone, even for incorrigible meat lovers. I wanted to put a link to one article, but I couldn’t even make a choice.

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. This article will focus on the question of what RSS is and why it should be used on your Internet resource. In general, this abbreviation means Really Simple Syndication, which translated means “Very simple acquisition of information.” The designation Feed is also very often used ( feed).

The essence of this name comes down to the fact that you are given the opportunity, in a form convenient for you, to follow the appearance of news on dozens and even hundreds of sites, blogs and forums. To say in one word what RSS is is not so simple, despite its apparent simplicity, and, accordingly, there will be a series of posts about everything related to this format.

In this section I plan to talk about what it is, how to activate it and configure it on a particular engine, how to set up its broadcast through, and then add it to various aggregators and catalogs, as well as how and the best way to read news feeds.

If you answer the question of what RSS is from the point of view of a webmaster (the owner of a web project), then we can say that this thing helps a lot in attracting additional visitors. By adding beautiful and eye-catching icons or a subscription button to your resource, you will encourage visitors to click on it, thereby acquiring an audience of regular readers.

What is RSS and why you should add an email subscription

We will talk specifically about what it physically is at the end of this article, but now I want to touch first of all on the question - what does a subscription to the site’s news flow provide and what opportunities does it provide for both users and owners of web projects.

In other words, why will you definitely need to put a subscription icon or button on your resource immediately after its creation, and why will it be convenient for users to subscribe to RSS feeds and view them in their readers?

It’s all about the convenience and timeliness of receiving information about the release of new materials on Internet projects of interest to users. Once you subscribe to the sites you are interested in, you will no longer need to go to them in order to see if anything new has appeared there.

As soon as a new article or commentary on an article that is important to you appears on a web project that interests you, you will immediately find out about it (through your favorite reader), if, of course, you have subscribed to the news flow of these resources in advance. Comfortable? Undoubtedly!

But, unfortunately, for a number of reasons, subscription and reading news in readers has not yet become as common and common an activity as reading email (only every tenth user reads news feeds in a specialized reader). People are quite inert and are not very eager to study and understand something new. This is exactly what happens with RSS readers.

Take a closer look, you will almost always find something like this on blogs. "RSS to E-mail" or the like (for example, at the top of the page on the right is the inscription “Receive updates by E-mail”, and at the bottom of each post there is a corresponding form for entering E-mail.

This is implemented, as a rule, in one of two ways: either through the above-mentioned “RSS to E-mail” service, or through the FeedBurner online service (I provided a link to the manual just above). These are, of course, half measures, because... When reading by E-mail, you are deprived of the lion's share of the conveniences that a specialized reader provides you.

But it’s better than nothing at all. For example, out of 7,000 users subscribed to the site’s news flow, more than half receive newsletters by E-mail, and do not use any reader for this.

Icons and buttons, as well as protection from RSS Grabber

Now let's see what the news flow looks like. To do this, you don’t need to have an e-reader at hand; you just need to find the corresponding icon or button on the page of the resource that interests you. As a rule, webmasters try to make this icon noticeable and catchy (a typical color for it is orange).

If you want to find and download a button to subscribe to the RSS of your site, you can use any resource; there are plenty of them on the Internet.

It is very important that your button is large enough and has a catchy, but at the same time not repulsive appearance. It should be placed somewhere at the top of your resource(on the first screen). On blogs, it can most often be seen at the top of the right column (sidebar).

This is where your visitors will look for this button when they want to subscribe to your new materials. Therefore, you probably shouldn’t be original - place a catchy and preferably original icon in its usual place, so as not to complicate the life of visitors.

Free-rss-icon-list

By the way, on various Internet projects you can also come across the so-called Feedburner counter (it shows the number of currently subscribed visitors), by clicking on which you can familiarize yourself and, if desired, subscribe to the news feed.

My feed acquired this look thanks to broadcasting the RSS feed via Feedburner, which provides a lot of tools for customizing its appearance and not only its appearance (look for the link to the manual at the beginning of the article). But more on that later.

Now I want to dwell on one key point that each owner of a resource with an active feed decides in his own way. The question is: how to protect yourself from Grabber, which extract the texts of your feeds and publish them on slogs (a blog automatically filled with content stolen from feeds) and other GS (go... sites).

In principle, an option that can help here is not to publish the full text of the article in the feed, but only the beginning, so that the reader can read the ending on your resource. As you can already see, the blog feed site is just a cut-off version (I don’t want to give thieves an easy way to use my content).

However, I am not an ardent supporter of this method of distributing RSS feeds and it is possible that I will soon publish the full text of articles in order to create convenience for reader users.

In support of the trimmed version of the news stream, one more argument can be made, in addition to protection from Grabber: after reading the beginning of the article and becoming interested in it, the user will click on the link and continue reading on your web project, which will increase its traffic and, possibly, increase earnings from contextual advertising (work with YAN through Profit Partner is described).

Among the negative aspects, the following can be cited: the user does not have access to the Internet at the time of reading the article (and sometimes simply does not want to go to your resource when there is still a lot of unread news from other websites in the reader) or simply the habit of reading news exclusively in reader. Which forming method to choose is up to you.

Perhaps it’s also worth talking about what the RSS format essentially represents. It is a standardized data format of the XML family, like html. But it has strict restrictive rules, which makes it very convenient to disassemble it automatically.

Moreover, this format has the main goal of transmitting content, and this leads to the cutting off of all sorts of excesses, such as design, various scripts, styles used. In fact it's crystal clear content- a dream for owners of a slow or paid per megabytes downloaded Internet connection (.

How does it work? Simple enough. The content of your feed is entered into the database, and the reader of the user subscribed to your newsletter goes to this address and downloads all the contents of the feed. Subsequently, the reader begins to periodically, depending on how the user configures it, contact the same address for updates.

If updates are found, the reader will immediately let the user know about this with a pop-up window or in some other way (it all depends on the specific reader).

So, to summarize: RSS is a very convenient thing that will help save us time and traffic, and will also allow us to always be aware of the news we are following. This is from the reader's point of view.

From the site owner's point of view - This is an invaluable tool, without which full development and advancement is impossible. Here is the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of the article - why do you need to fence off this entire garden?

Using this technology and format is very easy, you just have to try it. I’ll talk about using PSS in practice, about possible settings for various engines, about setting up broadcasting of a feed through Feedburner, about which aggregators you should add your feed to, and about which readers are best to get acquainted with feeds, in this section.

RSS readers (readers)

Readers are distinguished by an enviable diversity. There are programs that you will need to install on your operating system. Some browsers, for example Opera, also allow you to read news feeds. But there is also a whole galaxy of readers that you can use online without installing anything on your computer.

Compared to software readers, online readers have a couple of advantages - they do not need to be installed and can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet, and such readers can constantly automatically aggregate news from all sites to which you are subscribed (as a result, you simply go under use your login to such a reader and see everything new that has appeared since your last login).

Let me give you a list of online readers that you can use for your needs:

Yandex Tape is one of the most popular readers in RuNet. There is a special button from Yandex so that your visitors can subscribe to your RSS feed directly through Yandex Feed (there is a description of it).
Google Reader- an almost ideal reader, which, unfortunately, has already closed. The entire world community is deeply saddened by this.
Netvibes - has a huge number of settings and rich functionality.

There are a lot of programs for reading feeds and your choice will not be so simple. I myself do not use such programs, so I cannot recommend anything specific. Sorry.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site

What is RSS?

RSS is an abbreviation for the phrase Really Simple Syndication, which literally means “Really Simple Syndication”. The word syndication in the web dictionary means the simultaneous distribution of information. We get an academic definition of what RSS is:

RSS is an Internet service for the simultaneous dissemination of information on the Internet, as quickly and simply as possible.

What does Really Simple Syndication (RSS) mean?

The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) service itself cannot work without a set of tools. All of these RSS tools that I will list are part of syndication technology.

RSS formats

Special formats have been and continue to be developed for information syndication. These formats are unique and are not used in other Internet technologies. I will list them in order of appearance:

RSS0;
RSS0;
Atom;

RSS feed

An RSS feed or RSS channel is a unified document in XML format that is delivered to the user as part of RSS syndication.

An RSS feed is generated on a web resource (site) from the latest messages or notifications published on the site. Each created feed has its own unique URL address, which allows us to talk about each RSS feed as a separate web resource, updated when new material is released on the linked site.

An RSS feed is generated from the headings of materials, from headlines and announcements, or from the complete material published on the site. A distinctive feature of the feed is that new information appears on it almost instantly after it is published on the site. This is what allows the user who has subscribed to the site’s feed to quickly receive the news that is published on the web resource.

The relevance of this speed is obvious for news portals and news sites. The speed of dissemination of information for shops and enterprises is important. A quick connection with readers is interesting for all information sites and blogs.

RSS reader

A document in xml format is very different from readable formats such as doc and the RSS feed in XML format itself is not interesting to the reader. To read RSS feeds, there are special services, applications or programs. These programs are called Really Simple Syndication reader (RSS reader).

With rss readers, readers can use the URLs of RSS feeds of websites to monitor news published on the site.

As a rule, RSS readers use their own interface, and the distribution of news becomes not only useful, but also enjoyable to read. Examples of RSS readers include: the FeedBurner service, the catalog of Russian-language RSS channels liverss.ru (http://liverss.ru).

Autodiscovery RSS

Autodiscovery RSS is a method for searching RSS content in XML format generated on a website. The Autodiscovery RSS method allows the user's browser to find a site's RSS feed, regardless of whether it is in RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 or Atom format. Web administrators can enable RSS auto-discovery on a website by adding the tag in the page header. The tag must include the name and URL of the channel associated with the website. For example:

RSS and CMS

Most CMS used to create websites automatically generate an RSS feed or feeds for their site. For example, WordPress can generate five post feeds (atom, rdf, rss (obsolete), rss2, feed) and two comment feeds (atom and rss2). Joomla generates atom and rss2 feeds for the main page, menu pages and categories.

Therefore, you don’t need to think about creating RSS feeds for your website yourself. For Joomla, it is enough to enable them in the settings, and WordPress will create them without you enabling them; you can only choose what should be included in the feed, an announcement or the entire article.