What is RSS and why should you care?

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Update: I have modified this tutorial since I first published it.  I found a problem with the feed that prevented the Feedburner page from being displayed.  Sorry for any confusion - it should now work in both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.


Rather confusingly, the letter "RSS" did not always stand for the same thing.  If you're interested, you can read the history of RSS at Wikipedia.  I prefer the "Really Simple Syndication" definition.  But it's less important what it stands for - what's important is what it does.

A simple definition.

To avoid confusion here I'm going to use the word "bookmark" rather than"add to favourites"; the latter will be familiar to Internet Explorerusers.  Bookmarking a page is the same as adding it to your favourites.

Think about what you do when surfing the web.  You visit a website, and if you like it, you bookmark it.  That's all very well for finding the website again (although I know people who have so many bookmarks they can't find anything).  But what if you want to find out whether a site has been updated?  You could just go to the site.  So what if you want to do this for a lot of different sites?

An RSS feed can solve these problems.  RSS is the format used in a feed, much like HTML is the format used in a web page.  I like to think of an RSS feed as a cross between a What's New page and a bookmark.  You can bookmark the site if you wish, but if you bookmark the feed, you'll get a lot more out of it.

How to discover a feed.

Before we get into this, you need to be using Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox.  There are other browsers that support feeds, but I'm not going to discuss those here.  Please note, if you use a version of Internet Explorer that is older than version 7, you will not be able to discover feeds.  You can find out what version number you're using by clicking on Help, About.

First, go to my home page.  I suggest you open this in a new window or tab - to do this, hold the CTRL key and click on the link.  Wait for the page to load, then look for the orange feed icon.

In Firefox, you can find it at the end of the address bar - when clicked, it will open a list of three feeds (as that's how many feeds I have on my site).  Click on the first one in the list.  Firefox screenshot:



In Internet Explorer 7, you'll see an arrow just next to the feed button on the toolbar.  Click the arrow and you'll see the list of feeds - click on the first one in the list.  Internet Explorer 7 screenshot:



Things should now be the same regardless of the browser you use - at least for the time being.  Here's what the feed looks like:



The important bits are on the right-hand side.  You can choose to subscribe with a web-based news reader - these are programs that make it easier for you to manage multiple feed subscriptions.  I may be showing you a couple of examples in a future blog entry.

For now, you'll want to click on the "get... delivered by email" link.  You will be asked to fill in your email address and one other field (an anti-spam measure).  Do that, click the "complete subscription request" button, and check your email.  You'll be sent a link that you can click to confirm your subscription.  Whenever I update my site, you'll get an email.  You can unsubscribe at any time, and you can also do this on any other site that uses Feedburner.

Subscribing in your browser.

You can also subscribe to the feed within your browser.  To do this, click on the "View Feed XML" link from the Feedburner page.  This has different results depending on your browser.

In Firefox, you'll be able to subscribe to the feed using Live Bookmarks.  These allow you to look at the feed in your browser.  Click on the "Subscribe Now" button and choose a location for the feed.  It looks something like this:



I've only shown the first few items but you'll see a lot more when you subscribe.  This means you can quickly see if there are any new blog entries on my site.  You can do this for as many sites as you like.

In Internet Explorer 7, the feed looks like this:



Notice the "Subscribe to this feed" button at the top.  Click on that and you'll be able to save it much like you do with your favourites.  You'll then be able to view the feed in future by opening the Favourites sidebar.

Another way to access Feedburner feeds.

You'll notice I have a Feedburner counter image on my home page.  These are quite common on blogs across the web, and all you have to do is click the Feedburner icon to subscribe to the feed.

But as you've seen, some sites have multiple feeds, so those sites would need multiple Feedburner icons to handle that.  Also, not every site uses Feedburner - this is true of many news sites.  That's why it helps to know some of the different ways you can subscribe.

To be honest, without feeds, I wouldn't read a lot of blog entries.  I usually subscribe to a feed by email so I get the new posts directly in my inbox.  You can easily unsubscribe, so if a blog suddenly goes from publishing great content to publishing stuff that's of no interest, don't feel you have to stay tied to that blog.


Has this helped you at all?  Do you use feeds?  How many feeds have you subscribed to (roughly)?

Did you like this post? Subscribe today!

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