What Is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a format used to deliver information from websites or blogs that get updated constantly. The advantage of RSS is that allows people to read the latest headlines from their favorite sites without even visit them.

This is how it works if you have a blog: Every time you write and publish a new article on your blog, an email notification is sent to your subscribers with your latest article for them to read it. This email notification (or RSS document) is called news “news feed”, “web feed” or just “feed”. These special computer programs “RSS aggregator” are specially developed to automatically access the RSS feeds of your website and organized the result for your readers. RSS feed and RSS aggregators are sometimes called “RSS Channels” or “RSS Readers”.

 

The acronym RSS stands for many versions, but does it matter? Of course not, you can use any of the versions available (all of them are used for the same thing).

·        Really Simple Syndication

·        Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)

·        RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

·        Real-time Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

All of us have some typical website we like to visit, we can subscribe to the RSS feed of all those websites and receive the latest information in the form of headlines. If you have a website or blog you can distribute the latest information to all your readers via RSS.

RSS is really a win, for both subscriber and publishers. Want a simpler explanation of what RSS is? Watch this awesome video that explains RSS in plain English.