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Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS
When I’m asked to describe what RSS actually is, I explain it with a metaphor: When you update your Web page, how many people are aware of it? Those few who visit your site every few days, right? But what of the people who have stopped visiting your site because the con tent doesn’t change frequently enough? If you go on holiday for a few weeks, do you lose your reader base? What if, instead, you had a system that was designed to track changes and notify people running special aggregator software when your site changes? That’s what RSS is all about. With an RSS reader, you can keep track of the content of dozens—or hundreds— of different Web sites, and you see only what’s new since your last visit.
With an RSS feed, people can subscribe to your feed and keep up-to-date on your Web site with a simple RSS reader or aggregator. A few great examples of aggregators are NewsGator (for Windows, it’s at http://www.newsgator.com/ and integrates with Microsoft Outlook), RssReader (for Windows, it’s at http://www.rssreader.com/ and is a separate application) and NetNewsWire (for Macintosh, at http://www.ranchero.com/). Figure 13-9 shows RssReader displaying the RSS feed from my Intuitive Life weblog.
Figure 13-9: RssReader displaying RSS feeds.
RSS is a compelling solution for a lot of organizations. InfoWorld, for example, offers eight different RSS feeds for professionals in the information technology business. CNN, The New York Times, BBC World Service, and many other information sources also offer the capability to track their content via RSS. Also, you can track hundreds, no, thousands, of personal weblogs just as easily—weblogs on topics as far-ranging as parenting, NASCAR drivers, acting, professional swimming, and many more topics. All these feeds can be neatly organized in an RSS aggregator program, whether you’re on a Mac, Linux system, Unix box, Windows machine, or even PDA.