RSS and blogs

The second post took a while in coming. But I'm still finding my feet here, so bear with me.

I told a few friends about this blog, and told them to subscribe to the same on their RSS feed. Some of them asked me what that was... that's fair enough, it's what I'm here for. And I'll try to explain it. (RSS, btw, also refers to the Rashtriya Swayemasevak Sangh, a Hindu religious organization. I'm not talking about that, just in case. It's membership is upwards of 2 million... always surprised by that figure)

The idea is very simple. Subscribing to a newspaper used to give you access to information in the good old days. But that information came from only one source. TV channels then let you get information from a number of sources, at little increase in cost. But a lot of information was something you didn't want. (Who here loves Aaj Tak?) The Internet, of course, turned that on it's head. Now, you could choose the news you wanted to see. The trouble with that is, case you are reading your news from a news website, or a blog, you'd have to visit the page, and then find out the "new" news. Of course, you could use services that brought these news together at one place. But that's just a newspaper, isn't it :D Enter, RSS. What RSS does is, you tell an 'RSS reader' what news you want and from what source. Then, it'll bring those news down to you any time you want. So all of your news, at one place. And mind you, it'll mark out the latest news... just to save you the effort.

I'm still new to this, so, in case I've messed up my explanation, you can search on youtube for what are RSS feeds

Now, there are several ways to use these news. And, they're very easy to use. There's your web browser, for firefox, Internet Explorer 7 , and opera. There's rss readers available online, like Google Reader. It's built like gmail, so you should not have much trouble using it if you've used e-mail :D . 

The last part, of course, is how to use it. I told my friends to RSS my blog because I know they might be too lazy to check my blog regularly. As a blogger, the more people have your blog address on RSS, the better. Then we come to the technical side. An RSS feed is essentially XML in an agreed-upon format. XML lets you store your data in a human-readable format, that can be read by any machine. Those more technically minded would realize that that “any” is very important here. So, an RSS feed is just a standard that can be used to describe any new published news. Since it is standard, people the world over can write programs that use it. So do I, in fact. For PHP, I've used Magpie, and currently I'm using JSP, and Sun Microsystems has it's own tag library for that.

That should be enough to get you started on RSS.