Ive been on a bit of and RSS and Feeds binge as of late I even produced a free report. Its more about how to solve the problems that many people have have with RSS , Feeds and Feed burner. I called it FEED POWER.

What it doesn’t cover is how to go about setting up your Feedburner account , re-directing your old wordpress feed to a new feedburner feed or any of the Set up neccesary needed to get your feed going, well it does cover some of the basics. But nothing as detailed as what I’m about to tell you about.

If you want the best information Ive ever come across about setting up an RSS feed on Feedburner then I suggest you go have look at Oh my stinking heck’s post wordpress wednesday feed me baby

It’s jam packed with pdetailed pictures, its a step by how to set up feed burner account. And the second half of her post, that she aludes to the rest of the RSS story Covers Getting Feedburner to auto discover your blogs RSS Feed and editing your header.php file, which is something I hadnt thought of until I read that post (on my lengthy to do list) Subscribe to her feed

Why is this change necessary? Just because you’ve installed the Feedsmith FeedBurner plugin does NOT mean everyone who comes to your blog is getting your customized burned feed. It only means when they do subscribe, it is being redirected to FeedBurner

I really can’t stress enough the importance of building your RSS subscriber base:

Build your RSS reader and subscriber base huge and fast!! (snippet from 619,000 RSS subscribers can’t be wrong)

“Why?, it’s the best defensible traffic strategy, and the Best Google page rank defense strategy.

I say this only because its what makes total sense. Think about it. Lets say you have been found guilty of selling text links on your blog, or website by google. What would be a good defense against the page rank degrade? HIGH RSS subscribers.

Look at tech crunch he has 619,000 rss readers, do you really think he cares if google slaps him back a bit? NO”

This is by far one of the better descriptions I have found About what is RSS from Yaro Starak of entrepreneurs journey. I highly recommend if you haven’t already that you subscribe to his feed

If you didn’t know what an RSS feed was before you read this then you’re definitely going to be well edumacated about RSS feeds after reading this post. I’m sure I’ll catch hell for posting the whole article but hey its a great resource.

After having chatted with a few blogging newbies it seems like lots of them maybe even you have no idea what RSS, XML and syndication are…whoa, Look at those mumbo jumbo techno-babble terms confusing HUH!

Definitions for Rss

About six months ago that I had no idea what these terms were. I understood what XML was because I had read a webpage about it but I had no idea how it all worked with syndication of content. Just as I learnt how trackbacks work by actually using them I did the same with syndication. I also took the time to read the definitions of the terms and as usual the W3c schools entries on XML, RSS, Web Syndication and Web Feed are a good place to start. W3c Schools is more or less the standard for web design, if you haven’t visited there maybe you should at some point

What Is RSS: The Basics

Ok so what exactly is RSS? RSS stands for (Really Simple Syndication) it allows to syndicate (publish, post - insert your favourite term here) or subscribe (receive) to the feed of a website, blog or almost any media content online (not just articles, it can be music, video or almost any digital media). By syndicating you subscribe (allow you to receive) to the feed of the site. So what this means is you don’t have to visit the website/blog to read their latest content. Instead you use feed reading software or a website to read the latest articles. Instead of going to each of your favourite sites individually you can collect all the feeds of the sites (provided they make them available) in one place. The purpose of syndication is to therefore make it more easier for you to get your favourite content. Or of course you can have it sent to your in-box. I personally prefer that, more often than not.

If you are not into the technical side of the Internet your don’t need to know much about XML. It’s basically the formatting language that software and websites use to distribute the content to your feed reader. If you know nothing about HTML then you probably don’t really need to know much about XML either. Just understand that behind syndication is the language XML.

The best way to learn is by practice and example so let me tell you exactly how I use RSS.

Feed Reading Software

At the moment I use RSSOwl which is software you install on to your computer. Like all software there is a learning curve to using RSSOwl however once you have subscribed to your first feed it becomes very easy. If you get really stuck try the help menu or check the website out for guidelines.

There are other feed reading software programs out there and a Google search for RSS reader will bring up many options. I tried three different programs and stuck with RSSOwl because it was free, light weight and functional for what I wanted. There are prettier and more functional feed readers out there and I’ll leave it up to you to choose your favourite.

Web Based Feed Reading

With a standalone software feed reader like RSSOwl you have to be on the computer you installed the software to in order to have access to your feeds. Because of this limitation many people choose to use a web based feed reader and the most popular is Bloglines. Bloglines works much like feed reading software except because it is entirely based on the Internet you can access your syndicated feeds online from any computer connected to the web. You can also share your feeds with other people or search other people’s feed lists to see what is popular.

Subscribing to a Blog

To continue with my example…of course I subscribe to my own feed, the RSS of this blog. At the top right corner you will see an orange RSS link button. To subscribe to my feed all you do is copy and paste that link into feed reading software or a web based reader like bloglines. You may also have to name the feed and strangely enough this feed is called “Entrepreneur’s Journey”. The RSS feed link for this site looks like this - http://feeds.feedburner.com/EntrepreneursJourney - and if you click it you will get the XML output of this blog. That’s the stuff I told you about that you don’t really need to understand, but take a look by clicking the link if you are interested. Note that I use a special third party service called FeedBurner that adds extra features to my feed output and most importantly it provides me with statistics on how many people subscribe to my blog.

All blogs will have a link which you can subscribe to. It might be called Atom, or RSS, or simply Syndicate, but they all do the same thing. The reason there are so many names is because there are different standards to create web syndication services (much like the old BETA vs VHS video format competition). At the moment it appears that RSS is certainly winning the standards war so you will mostly see the orange RSS links everywhere.

Syndication is for More than Just Blogs

Blogs certainly started the syndication craze but it is well and truly breaking out now. I wouldn’t call it mainstream just yet since not many people know how to use it but most of the big web companies are making subscription feeds available for almost any content. Chances are if you are reading an article from a big site you can subscribe to a feed that distributes those articles. Just look for that RSS symbol.

Besides article distribution a new craze has launched called Podcasting. I’m not going to go into Podcasting in this article since it is a subject that deserves its own article. For the purposes of understanding how Podcasting is related to syndication all you need to know is that a Podcast is an audio show, like radio but usually focused on voice because music is copyrighted. Unless you have the rights to the music you may get into trouble if you broadcast it in a podcast. People use syndication to subscribe to a Podcast audio show which they can listen to on their computer or download to an mp3 player.

Update: If you want to learn about podcasts please read - What is a Podcast and How Can I Use One?

The Future

RSS is designed to make your Internet life easier. At the moment it’s worthwhile to become familiar with this technology simply because you are going to be seeing a lot more of it. If you can keep abreast of the technology wave you will have less frustration when using the Internet.