What Can I Use RSS For?
Will RSS improve your sex life? Or make you rich? Maybe... Maybe not. Find out what RSS CAN do for you.
If you don't already know, RSS is stands for Really Simple Syndication, which is a format for distributing information over the Internet.
Originally used for news and weather, RSS is now used to distriibute almost any type of information you can imagine! The real beauty of RSS is that you can choose to subscribe to a feed which interests you, and get the latest information on that topic delivered to you whenever it becomes available... and unlike email, you don't have to worry about SPAM!
So - to answer our first question - Will RSS improve your sex life? It probably could. A quick search for RSS feeds at Google or any other search engine will probably find a huge collection of feeds you can look at.
Will it make you rich? Again, there's probably heaps of feeds that, if the information is applied properly by you, it could make you rich!
But here's the $64 question - as it is with anything you find on the Internet - How reliable is the information? As long as you don't believe everything you read, then RSS could be a great tool you can use.
So what do you use RSS for?
Simply put... you use RSS to keep up to date with changing information. For example, look at these 15 typical uses of RSS feeds:
- track news headlines
- find great shopping deals – items on special, new products
- track parcels
- keep in touch with entertainment events, concerts etc
- create a personal events calendar to share with others
- get TV programs
- find today’s weather
- get a “word of the day” or “quote of the day”
- read your horoscope
- organise lists
- track finance/stock figures
- read your favourite cartoons
- get sports results, follow your team
- lists of things – top 10 tips for (anything), popular songs, etc
- see the “latest” things – latest articles, new products, new web sites
As you can see... if you want to stay up-to-date, then all you've got to do is find a good RSS feed on your topic of interest, and you are (almost) there.
The Trouble Is...
Life is not meant to be easy... If you click on one of those little orange RSS buttons, you'll more than likely see a page of weird looking XML code. Not really user friendly is it?
What you need to do is
1. find some RSS Reader software you can download to your computer,
OR
2. use a web based RSS Reader to read the feeds in your web browser.
Once you've worked out how you can read the feeds - either software or web based readers - you then have to learn how to drive that particular reader.
Basically, they all work the same. To add a feed to the reader, you usually need to COPY the feed URL you want, and then PASTE it into the reader - usually behind an ADD FEED button or similar.
Then, when you want to look at the information,
- Just click on the feed in your reader to see a list of headlines.
- Clicking on a headline will then show a summary of what the item is about - the introductory paragraph.
- Click again on that should take you to the original web page where the item came from so you can read the rest of the story in detail.
And that's about it!
Provided the person who creates the feed is doing their job properly, you should be able to access information that gets regularly updated... maybe hourly, daily or weekly.
HOT TIPS
Feeds that aren't updated regularly are not really worth subscribing to. If somethhing hasn't been updated for several months, get rid of the feed from your RSS reader.
Check the RSS Feeds Directory at RSSisKING.com. You will be able to view each feed online here, so it might be simplest to just bookmark that page if it's of interest to you. And if you find a new one that seems OK, then suggest it to us to include in our directory.
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