Getting the News Out

RSS is the way to go to share your site’s news, but there are issues to understand. We help you sort them out.

Oct 1, 2003

Among a Webmaster’s biggest challenges are keeping content fresh and advertising what’s new. The RSS specification for syndicating content is a way to meet both needs. Content providers create RSS versions of their news stories and register the RSS files with news aggregators. News aggregators, which can run on the Web (such as Moreover Technologies) or on your desktop (such as AmphetaDesk), regularly scan the RSS files at registered sites and display any new information. The aggregators get fresh content, and the content providers get click-throughs and backlinks to improve their search engine rankings.

RSS syndication was originally designed for newsfeeds, but it also can be used to broadcast event listings, software or book revisions, project updates, corporate news, and more. More recently, RSS feeds have become a popular means for bloggers to announce updates to their Weblogs.

Competing Specifications

What does RSS stand for? Depending on whom you ask, it could stand for RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication. (RDF stands for Resource Description Framework.) The reason for the varying names is that RSS is not one specification. It is several competing specifications along two ... // 74% Remaining

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