In this Quick Tip Monday we’re going to try and answer the question, “What is RSS?”. Quick Tip Monday is a regular feature here on MatthewHooper.com. Quick Tip Monday features a quick tip that will hopefully add a little speed to your workflow or help solve one of those minor, but nagging, problems.

What is RSS?

This week’s Quick Tip isn’t so much of a tip as much as it is a quick explanation about something that I get asked a lot. What is RSS? I wrote previously about managing RSS overload but today we are going to take a step back and look at “what is RSS?“.

The annalogy that comes to mind for RSS is magazines that are delivered to your door versus visiting a magazine shop to buy them.  Imagine going to a shop every day just to find out if there is a new magazine. Some days there is and somedays there isn’t. Magazines that are delivered just show up at your house whenever a new issue is available.

This is what RSS is. It’s the digital form of home delivery. After you have subscribed to an RSS feed (most are free) then updates are pushed to your newsreader. My newsreader of choice is Google Reader. Going forward, any updates to that site will be automatically delivered to you. You won’t have to keep checking back to the website every day in order to find out if there is anything new.

(Image by: damien_nissa)

I Know What is RSS, but Why Do I Need RSS?

As a publisher or website owner, you will want to take advantage of this technology. RSS gives your site visitors the ability to recieve free updates simply by plugging the address of your RSS feed (mine is http://feeds.feedburner.com/matthewhooper, for example) into a newsreader. They will be notified as soon as you add new content to your site.

Furthermore, this also lays the groundwork to automatically deliver site updates via email, but that is a topic for another day.

I hope that this has helped to answer what is RSS but please leave a comment below if you have any further questions.

• Share

Share This

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

About the author

Matt
I'm Matt and I share how to build an internet presence through internet business, social marketing, lifestyle design and productivity tools. While here, read about me to learn my story or find out how you can hire me.

Related Posts

5 Tips to Managing RSS Information Overload

I am often asked how I monitor news from many sources. As soon as I mention RSS and Google Reader people's eyes usually start to gloss over. RSS is short for Real Simple Syndication but it does not always come across as simple. RSS...

10 Great Extensions For Chrome

Ever since I switched to Chrome I have been looking for extensions to the browser to mimic what I had with Firefox add-ons. Extension development is in an infantile stage right now but it is coming on strong. I have compiled...

The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks – Part 5 [Packrati.us, Delicious, Twitter, Google Reader]

This is the fifth part of The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social Networks series. If you have not read the other parts of this series you can find them here: The Missing (Social) Link: Linking Your Social...