Chapter 16
Reaching Out with RSS
In This Chapter
Figuring out what RSS really is
Signing up for an RSS feed
Putting RSS to work for your blog
No fashionable blog would be caught dead without a web feed. It's essential for both accessibility and promotion of your blog. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds, or web feeds, give you an easy way to distribute your content, such as blog posts and podcasts, to your web audience.
But what is RSS, really? In this chapter, I explain what an RSS feed is, how to create your blog feed (it's easy), how to subscribe to feeds, and more.
Getting the Goods on Web Feeds
RSS is one of the hottest technologies on the Internet today. Since 2003 — which is when blogs truly reached mainstream awareness — blogs and other technologies have adopted RSS at an exponential rate. Companies such as Mozilla, Microsoft, IBM, and many others have created really interesting ways to use RSS feeds to share information, both through their websites and through internal communication processes.
Put simply, when you syndicate your blog by using a web feed, feed software reads your blog posts, which it formats by using XML (eXtensible Markup Language). XML is an Internet ...
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