Sharing Your Site with RSS

Sharing Your Site with RSS

Sharing Your Site with RSS
by Jason Cook 14 May 2003

Jason Cook is a web consultant and writer living in Rome. He previously worked for TerraLycos as a product manager for the search engine HotBot, and was Webmonkey's product manager up until he decided that blindly relocating to Italy would be the Next Big Thing.

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Have you ever noticed those inviting orange buttons on some Web pages, or spotted the odd link pitching an "RSS feed"? If you've ever clicked one out of curiosity, and then scratched your head at the unformatted gobbledygook in your web browser, you've seen an RSS file.

What is it really for, anyway? Two things: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an easy way for sites to share headlines and stories so that other sites can integrate them into their pages. Additionally, some savvy surfers use special RSS aggregators — kind of like mini-browsers — to speedily flip through the latest news and links from dozens of sites.

In other words, Web builders use RSS to dish out and bring in fresh news and content on their websites, just like the big portals. And Web surfers can use RSS applications to collect custom-tailored selections of their favorite websites to be read at their leisure.