RSS Feeds for the Web

Why the RSS Feeds are so useful for web site owners.

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:46:08 +0200

RSS is a great way to frequently update your dynamic web site content by adding your news stories or display headlines from other web sites.

RSS is a web format used to publish frequently updated works - such as news articles, audio, and video - in a standardized format. An RSS document (also known "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes summarized text, publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content quickly and automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

RSS feeds can be read using "RSS reader" which I write in PHP. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's URL into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

The content provided using RSS could be also shared between many different web sites.