Forum Moderators: open
I’ve seen it everywhere, even my forum has it – but I don’t understand it.
An RSS feed is almpst like a page, but it contains nothing more than the "raw" info, no design etc.
The feed can then be used within an rss reader to extract the info and display it.
Mack.
What is an RSS reader - is this similar to blogging, minus the layout?
The easiest way to describe an RSS reader would be to compare it to email. Lets say you subscribe to a newsletter, they send you email whenever the newsletter is released...with an RSS reader you subscribe to a newsletter, but keep checking the publishers site to see if it is new or updated. You can unsubscribe at anytime and do not get your inbox filled up with stuff you no longer want.
Blog software usually provides some sort of RSS feed, atom or xml which can be read by rss readers. It is the content of the site without the style/layout.
[edited by: werty at 4:44 pm (utc) on June 30, 2005]
If not, why? It sounds it.
Mack.
I've actualy taken my time to look for some RSS feeds, and it wasn't hard. It's just a document tree - almost like viewing a source code, I noticed.
<rss version="2.0"><channel>
<title>blog of ####</title>
<description>Latest blog entries on #### for ####</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<link>http://www.####.com/</link>
</channel>
</rss>
Now I am sort of getting the message - I'll install the RSS reader now, and report back.
Reporting Back:
Okay, so I have installed it, and tried to add that blog above to the feeds, the url is as follows.
[####.com...]
Is that correct - or do I have to mess with the URL?
I think I know what's going to happen; is it going to translate the RSS to make it readable as a document, just like a browser would html and other web programming languages?
what it does is read the tags... each tag has an <open> and a </close> everyting between the tags is an rss element.
<item>
<part>this is a part</part>
<part2>this is the 2nd part</part2>
<part3>this is the third part</part3>
</item>
when readable it will be shown as...
this is a part
this is the 2nd part
this is the third part
The <item></item> contains all the elements of the "item"... within a feed you may have many different items such as article 1 article 2 etc etc.
The <tag>'s contain information. each tag with the same name is related.. different content but same informaion if you know what i mean...
<item>
<part>story1</part>
<part2>this is story 1</part2>
<part3>this is some text from story 1</part3>
</item>
<item>
<part>story2</part>
<part2>this is story 2</part2>
<part3>this is some text from story 2</part3>
</item>
<item>
<part>story3</part>
<part2>this is story 3</part2>
<part3>this is some text from story 3</part3>
</item>
Mack.
I appritiate you sparing your time to attempt to, and evetualy teach me about RSS.
[rssgov.com...]
