What is RSS?

So what is RSS you asked!

RSS is an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication” in the Internet terminology. RSS acts like a news ticker, like those you see in the news sites that usually comes as summarized content or information about a website/s. If you have the RSS technology or perhaps active in your system, you get to know the updates on certain websites at a glance without spending time to visit the homepage and see what has been added or updated.

In the old days, we do this task by bookmarking the websites we stumble along the way and later on, we manually visit them to get updates. This was a manual approach and will surely make the task a headache if you happen to have a ton of websites to follow. Once you miss to visit your bookmarks, you missed the freshest information.

Nowadays, RSS can be integrated in our Internet browsers, through the help of RSS readers. One concrete example of this is the Google RSS reader. This means, you got to have this kind of medium to enjoy the functionality offered by the RSS technology. RSS feed items may come in summary or full.

Basically you can subscribe to an RSS on-site and right into your browser. For the former, you may have seen the cute buttons below in most of the websites or blogs that you have visited. They are feed subscription buttons coming through feed technologies like Feedreader and Bloglines, among many others.

The latter will show the RSS icon along the browser URL (Uniform Resource Locator ) box, like that orange little box in the image below pointed by a red arrow, assuming you are using Firefox browser. Clicking that icon will redirect you to your browser-based reader.