How Do I Read A Feed?

As an RSS feed consumer, you have a lot of choices, and many of them are free. It’s like the early browser wars. There are lots of competitors offering a core set of features plus their own special enhancements. Some are buggier than others. Some don’t offer the latest features (like audio and video enclosures, which we’ll discuss soon) yet, but they’re working on them. Some run on more OS platforms than others. Some integrate the features of a web browser, an old-style internet news group reader, and an RSS feed reader, while others only display RSS feeds. You’ve got to do a bit of research to find the one that’s best for your needs.

How Do You Generate An RSS Feed?

There are several ways to generate an RSS feed:

1) Directly from your blog software (if you blog), optionally enhanced by FeedBurner or a similar service. This is how I currently generate all of my feeds.

If you haven’t chosen your blog software yet, I highly recommend WordPress. It’s got a great feature set, it’s been around long enough to have a lot of the bugs fixed, lots and lots of loyal users of other blog software have moved to WordPress because it’s so much better, and it’s free, even for commercial use. It also seamlessly supports audio enclosures (podcasting) in your RSS feed.

If you need a place to host your blog and feed, iPowerWeb is by far the best low-cost service I’ve ever seen. Everything just works, they provide great statistics, site features and documentation, lots of storage and email accounts, proper and current PHP and MySQL support (necessary for many blogs including WordPress) and their tech support folks are responsive and follow up to make sure any issue gets resolved. WordPress installs and runs like a dream on iPowerWeb. With some other hosting providers, I’ve had to rewrite PHP code and place files in all sorts of unnatural places on my site to get it to work, due to silly restrictions and limitations of the hosting providers. I’ve tried several low-cost and medium-cost hosting services and now would never use anyone but iPowerWeb.

Which Version of RSS Do I Use?

Just like anything else in the high-tech industry, the standards for RSS are evolving quickly. For now, most programs which generate feeds seem to have settled on RSS 2.0, though RSS 0.9x and RSS 1.x variants are still around. There’s also a similar standard called Atom, which is used by Blogger and some of the other blog services. Most feed readers will understand and display all of these different formats, and will in fact deal with Atom feeds even though the programs are called “RSS” feed readers.

AdSense Advertising on Yahoo?

Yahoo plans to offer contextual advertising, similar to Google’s AdSense program. The question is , when? According to observations posted recently on Waxy.org, it may only be a few months from now, with testing already underway. Overture’s name is changing to Yahoo too. Sign up with Yahoo here to stay informed.

What is RSS Anyway?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary depending on who you listen to. It’s also confused with RDF (Resource Description Framework), XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and a variety of other related TLA’s (Three-Letter Acronyms). RSS is actually a family of web syndication protocols which provide information in XML files known as RSS feeds.

The issue is further confused by some “helpful” RSS feed readers, search engines and directories, which claim that RSS feeds always end with the .rss or .xml extension. NOT! In fact, RSS feeds can have almost any file extension or none at all. The current version of WordPress, a popular and free (free for commercial uses too!) blog software package which I use, uses the .php extension for all of the feeds it generates. I suspect that many other blog packages written in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) code also use that extension for their feeds. Feedburner, a great feed re-publishing service, doesn’t use an extension at all, unless you tell it to use a particular one.

Web-Based Feed Readers

Many RSS feed readers are web-based – you don’t actually have to install anything on your desktop, or even use your own system. Just go online in the internet cafe or the library or on your own computer and you can read any feed you want to. My Yahoo, Bloglines, NewsGator and MyFeedster are some of the popular web-based feed readers, and they’re free. Set up an account at no charge and go feed surfing.

If you set up your own RSS feed, and then tell My Yahoo about it, you’ll wind up with a listing in the Yahoo search engine (which would otherwise be much more difficult to get).

Mozilla vs Microsoft

Today, the Firefox web browser and its email companion Thunderbird, which are the open-source successors of Netscape from Mozilla, come with an RSS feed reader built into the 1.0 release. They also run on most OS platforms. Microsoft is playing catch-up. MS Internet Explorer has no RSS feed reader capability. But you just know it will, and soon. Microsoft sees the potential of RSS and how it’s taking hold across the web. They see Mozilla trying to take the new browser market away from them again. When that happens, anyone who’s not taking full advantage of RSS for their business or personal promotion will be left in the dust. Even if Microsoft enforces a new RSS standard, everyone else will support it, because of the sheer size of the Microsoft-based market. That’s just how it is.