What is RSS?

RSS Feeds provide a simple way of automatically receiving new content (articles, videos, podcasts, etc.) from a website withouth having to actuall visiting the website. This means you can have content coming from as many websites as you like and collected in one place, your news reader. In order to control what information is gathered for you and how it is displayed you need an aggregator or news reader. An aggregator or news reader can either be a software application you have installed on your computer or a website like Google Reader that collects and displays all of the content for you in a readable format.

The following video from Common Craft is a great, non-technical description of how RSS works and why most folks think its the best thing since ice cream and sliced bread:

How RSS works

The technology behind RSS is really quite simple. As a matter of fact RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. Think of syndication (distribution) like a syndicated tv or radio show, only in our case is content from websites which can also include audio or video. It's simply a specific, standardized data format (XML in this case) that news reader software can understand how to display.RSS works by taking a set of information and breaking it down into a collection of identifable items. For example, an RSS feed for a newspaper’s site might gather up the most recently published stories and break them down so the RSS file contains one RSS item for each headline. The end result is an RSS feed of the newspaper’s recently published headlines.

Identifying RSS-enabled sites

Most RSS-enabled sites will display an orange RSS like this either in the address bar of your browser, alongside links to their feeds, or both. This is a fairly universal indication that the site provides one or more RSS feeds of their content. Most sites will provide multiple feeds around specific topics so you can subscribe to just the kind of content or information you are interested in receiving. The RSS feeds available from the TigardCERT.org website are in the sidebar to the right. Keep in mind some of the feeds are only available to registered users, so if you are a Tigard CERT member be sure to set up an account so you have access to the members-only feeds and a lot of other content you won't be able to access without an account.

Aggregators/News Readers

There are just about as many readers as there are sources of content, but here are some of the most popular ones. Most modern web browsers like Internet Explorer or Safari have RSS reader capabilities built into them and you can read rss feeds directly in your browser. Here are some of the most popular readers for Windows and Mac. This article provides a great review of some of the leading readers available.

Google Reader, Website
Bloglines, Website
NewsGator, Windows
FeedDemon, Windows
Net Newswire, Mac