What is RSS feeds?
might be worth putting together a page to define RSS and hopefully shed some light on the topic.
Do you want to keep up to date with the latest posts on Gitui?
We have a number of ways that you can subscribe to this site and receive updates. The main one that our readers use is our RSS feed. But what is RSS?
What is RSS?
RSS is a technology that is being used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites.
In the ‘old days’ of the web to keep track of updates on a website you had to ‘bookmark’ websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added.
The problems with bookmarking
- You as the web surfer had to do all the work
- It can get complicated when you are trying to track many websites at once
- You miss information when you forget to check your bookmarks
- You end up seeing the same information over and over again on sites that don’t update very often
RSS Changes Everything
What if you could tell a website to let you know every time that they update? In a sense, this is what RSS does for you.
RSS flips things around a little and is a technology that provides you with a method of getting relevant and up to date information sent to you for you to read in your own time. It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quickly after it was published.
RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Many people describe it as a ‘news feed’ that you subscribe to.
I find the ’subscription’ description helpful. It’s like subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published it is delivered to your ‘RSS Reader’ every time your favorite website updates.
How RSS actually technically works is probably a lesson for another day but the key today is for you to understand why it’s good and how to use it.
Let me say right up front that I’m not the most technically savvy guy going around - but even I can use RSS. At first I found it a little strange to make the change from bookmarking to RSS but I found that when I started that I just couldn’t stop.
How to Use RSS
Get an RSS Reader - The first thing you’ll want to do if you’re getting into reading sites via RSS is to hook yourself up with an RSS Feed Reader.
There are many feed readers going around with a variety of approaches and features - however a good place to start is with a couple of free and easy to use web based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines. Either one will do if you’re starting out (I use Google’s Reader) - as I say there are many others to choose from but to get started either of these are fairly easy to use and will help you work out the basics of RSS.
Both of these feed readers work a little like email. As you subscribe to feeds you’ll see that unread entries from the sites you’re tracking will be marked as bold. As you click on them you’ll see the latest update and can read it right there in the feed reader. You are given the option to click through to the actual site or move onto the next unread item - marking the last one as ‘read’.
The best way to learn how to use either Google Reader or Bloglines is to simply subscribe to some feeds and give it a go. Both have helpful help sections to get you up and running.
Note: other options to tracking websites that you might already be familiar with include using pages like MyYahoo, MyGoogle and MyMSN.
Find Some Feeds to Subscribe to - there are two places to look for a site’s feed:
- On the Site
- In Your Browser
On Site Subscription
Over the last few years you may have noticed a lot of little buttons and widgets appearing on your favorite sites and blogs. Little orange buttons, ‘counters’ with how many ‘readers a blog has, links called RSS, XML, ATOM and many more.
They come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few you might have seen:
There are plenty more - but any time you see any of these buttons or anything like them it means that the site you are viewing almost certainly has a feed that you can subscribe to. In most cases it’s as simple as either copying and pasting the link associated with the button into your RSS Reader or clicking the button and following the instructions to subscribe using the feed reader of your choice.
Blogging, more than a hobby
I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that I use Twitter. Its a web recource that connects you with other people and keeps them updated of what you are doing on the internet. You can follow people and see what they get up to. Its a great way to share with people interesting things on the internet.
After I started using twitter i quickly realized that blogging is more than just writing something and leaving it out there. You have to communicate with your readers.
one person that follows me on Twitter reminded me of this. Elton said that if you advertise your twitter on your blog, you need to communicate with them. That made me think a bit. If I have a blog and just post things on there like a robot, sure, I’ll get visitors to my blog, and I have some readers. But you need to make it personal. I got an email from a blogger once, just thanking me for posting a comment on one of his posts. That made me feel really great. I immediately went back to his blog to see what else he has written, and I took a little extra time looking at his blog.
The same goes for RSS readers. You should try and give them a little extra because they follow what you write about. How many times do magazine’s send out something with their magazines to people who have signed up to get them in their mail? Its the same concept, just online.
If you have a blog or website, and want to “go the extra mile” make your readers/visitors feel like they are important to you. Give them the “thank you” email. They appricate it more than you think.
What do you think of this? do you like receiving emails where the blogger says thank you? do you like receiving that T-shirt in the post with your favourite magazine?
Robert
Paying for Traffic?
Your blog/website is up, you have your tracking set up and you get about 5 to 10 visitors a day. You have links to your site, but you still can’t get your visitor count up?
One of the first things to remember is: are you writing good articles? you need to think to yourself “what would I want from this article?” If you have good articles and your traffic goes up a bit more, but still not enough. what then?
You can actually pay for visitors. There are multiple ways in witch you can do this. You can have an adwords campaign going. You can sign up with affiliate sites. You can also trade links on a credit basis. You can even offer some websites/bloggers money for a link to your site and a good review. (the latter is mostly frowned upon.)
I’ve decided to give it a test run, to see what the outcome is of it and if it is really worth the while. I’ve signed up with NewGenTraffic, and the way they work is quite interesting.
When you sign up, you get either a basic account, or you can pay for an account. When you pay for an account, you get alot more out of the deal. For me, I’ve signed up with the free account. The way my account works:
I get a code, that I can place on my website. Similar to Google adsense advertising. Ads get displayed everytime a page is loaded. When someone clicks on one of those ads, I get credit points witch I can use to promote my own website/blog. The person who’s ad gets displayed and was clicked on, uses one of his credits for that click. with New Gen Traffic you can also Buy credits. The more credits you have the more ads you can run on other sites and the more traffic you eventually get.
So you can either wait for some visitors to come to your website and click on those ads, or you can jump the gun and buy credits. With Google adwords it works the same. You sign up with adwords and decide to display ads and how much you want to pay per click. When people visit other sites that have google adsense displayed, and your ad is clicked. You get charged with a certain amount. (you can specify how much.)
In that way, you payed for that person to come to your website.
There are many other way’s in witch you can get traffic by using this system. I will let you know what results I get after a week or so.
Robert
Sign up to my RSS feeds to stay updated.
RSS feeds, how they work
RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.
The benefit of RSS is the aggregation of content from multiple Web sources in one place. RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”, which can be web-based or desktop-based. 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 link 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, downloading any updates that it finds and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.
Ok, So what does RSS stand for? Really Simple Syndication. Simple.
It is getting more and more common for websites to have RSS feeds. They usually indicate the existence of the feed on the home page or main news page with a link to “RSS”. Text “RSS” links sometimes (there are lots of variations) point to a web page explaining the nature of the RSS feeds provided and how to find them. The buttons are often linked directly to the RSS feed file itself. These will direct you either to another website with those feeds on them, such Feedburner, or it will redirect you to another part of the site where the RSS feeds are stored.
You will also find some Sites that have buttons on them. here are some examples:
*RSS icons Could look like anything. They are Different. But the Second one is the “Real” original Icon.
Once you know the URL of an RSS feed, you can provide that address to an RSS aggregator program and have the aggregator monitors the feed for you. Many RSS aggregators come preconfigured with a list to choose from of RSS feed URLs for popular news websites.
I find RSS feeds to help me alot, it saves me from having to go to the websites to read the whole story. If it’s interesting, I go and visit. What is also nice, is that with RSS feeds you get a link straight to the post. So you don’t have to go and do a search for it either.
