What you need to know about RSS feeds. So, what are RSS feeds and why they are so popular among internet users and web developers? Shortly speaking, RSS is a technology that informs about new information on different sites and blogs. Any user can sign on RSS feed and receive the latest news and links to the information on the website. Depending on the version and specification of RSS the abbreviation means: – Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) – RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9, 1.0 and 1.1) – Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91) There were only three ways to look after favorite website updates before RSS feeds become available: 1. To visit your favorite website daily/weekly to find out if something new appeared. It is a waste of time if you have more than five favorites, particularly if you find no interesting updates. 2. To receive via e-mail notifications about website updates. In this case spammers can determine your e-mail and you`ll get additional advertisements. 3. To use a program to track page updates. This will check interesting sites and their changes. Apart from downloading and installing you`ll never know what precisely has changed there. And here comes RSS! The newest and best type of notifications about news or events on sites – RSS feeds. It is executed by means of a special page on your site which is called RSS-document, normally it is rss.Xml. This RSS-document does not contain any waste information such as site design or navigation menu. It basically consists of information on the latest website updates, the additional description of the news and the link to the source page. It should be known that one website can keep not only one RSS feed. It is often that apart from the main RSS feed one major site holds a lot of extra RSS channels with news for several site sections which gives the reader more limber choice if he does not wish to watch for all site news. How to create RSS feed on a site? There are a lot of ways to generate RSS channels with their advantages and disadvantages. For example, blogs can be used as such servers give links on RSS document of your blog, which you place on your site and get a "news channel". The other way is to make and manually edit the rss.Xml, for instance, by means of Notepad ++. In this case you shall need a good knowledge of HTML and XML, and if the news will appear frequently, this method will turn to be very boring. Thus the most convenient way is to use special RSS-generators, for example, RSS Channel Writer. It includes user-friendly tools like creator wizard, RSS editor, FTP manager, automatic RSS ping tool to RSS servers e t c. Being defended from making mistakes during RSS feeds creation, you don’t need to know XML syntax knowledge to create RSS feed with this program. In its turn, receiving and reading RSS feeds is maintained by means of RSS aggregators, either standalone (for example, free of charge FeedDemon), or integrated in a browser (IE7, IE8, Opera, Firefox). Such aggregators usually have less functions to work with RSS feeds in comparison with standalone programs` possibilities, but in case of using web browsers it is not needed to install any additional programs. Therefore the users are now ready to use RSS feeds, and web designers need only to use this possibility to affect in website community and to hold there more and more regular visitors.
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