What is RSS?

An RSS (variants: Atom, RDF, RSS) feed (Rich Site Summary feed) is a web-accessible file (similar to a web page's html file) and provides a way to be notified of recent additions to a web site such as news headlines, web site status, what has changed, blogs, etc. When combined with an RSS aggregator such as Bloglines, you can avoid visiting web sites where nothing has been recently updated.

Other sites talk about RSS

• Here's a description from the NYTimes

• RSS information at wikipedia

• Dive into XML

• MUSC Provost RSS How To

Examples

• Broadcast messages at MUSC

• MUSC Blog

• University of Wisconsin Library

• Nature

• New York Times

• Slashdot, a snapshot of many changing IT issues

• The Cooper River Bridge blog has an RSS feed

• Duke University has internal RSS feeds

How to use

Go to Bloglines, create an account, add a feed. Feeds are usually shown on web pages with an orange button and one of the words RSS, Atom, or XML. Alternatively, a site might explicitly say something like "Syndicate this". When using Bloglines, within the left menu beside each RSS feed is indicated the number of new entries from the feed site. Also visit the Provost's RSS HowTo for an overview of Blogs, RSS feeds and using Bloglines.

For Firefox users: Some web sites show an orange antenna-like symbol in the status bar. Click on this symbol, a menu opens saying "Subscribe...". Click that and it adds a Live Bookmark folder to your bookmarks. You can then check the status of that feed from that live bookmark.

CategoryDocumentation