Quote Of The Day :

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.
Edward Albee

RSS is a novel way of keeping yourself and your website updated. RSS is a new introduction to internet and is an alternative to email marketing. You might want to be updated and not left behind; otherwise your competition will surely overcome you. You want to keep yourself equipped with the latest news, headlines and make use of this information, RSS which is "Really Simple Syndication" comes to your rescue.

Short primer to RSS

A short introduction to RSS will help assess its need and the usability factor. If you search in the internet, you might also find other expansions to RSS acronym, like Rich Site Summary. However, the more common way of knowing RSS and the Wiki also describes it as "Really Simple Syndication" a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works. Examples are news headlines, Audio and Video content, blogs, websites, forums and the list goes on. A RSS feed includes full or summarized content and "metadata" such as information on author and published dates.

Google Reader - Free RSS feed

While there are RSS feeder tools both free and paid in the internet, Google Reader is one that I recommend to the beginners. Google Reader constantly checks for the new content and you can use it anywhere, it is free of cost. It is totally adaptable to most browsers and shows the content in one place that can be easily shared with your friends. What's more, it even works with a mobile phone browser.

Process of Adding RSS

Using a specific format, create a file for your feed. You will have to create the XML version of your feed that contains title or the headline, the description and the link where it can be red. Some of the RSS feed programs just require you to write news and articles on a notepad and when placed on an editor will show up the necessary formatting. After creating your file, save your data as an XML, RSS, or an RDF file. You are now ready to upload it. You can upload the file using the FTP program and place it on your web server. FTP is easily available as free trial tool in the internet. This process now makes the file readable by RSS news aggregators.

Validate and Update Your RSS File

There are different programs that can assist help validate your RSS file. For this process, you would just need to feed the saved and uploaded RSS file in the program in order to test it from errors like wrong code and missed tags. It is essential for you to check your RSS file, this way, you're sure that what you have is readable and usable. With RSS, you know that the feed changes automatically every time you change the main file. Don't let your RSS feed sit there for a month without modifying it. Update and maintain it by adding new articles. The more exciting your content is, more likelihood of people checking your feeds and visiting your website frequently.