RSS: Really Simple Syndication
Glossary July 5th, 2008
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Have you seen this image? It’s a symbol that advertises that a blog (or web site) has a RSS feed. (Sometimes you’ll see it called a “newsfeed.”)
Most blogging sosftware — including Wordpress — makes its content available through Really Simple Syndication or RSS. A RSS feed is basically the site content stripped of all its fancy formatting.
RSS lets you read blogs and websites in lots of different ways. You can read them through a desktop or browser-based feedreader. You can have some blogs (like this one) mailed to your email box. You can read content on another site (if the blogger has given that site permission to list the RSS feed).
Instead of having to click around to see if a site was updated, you get notified in your feedreader when a new post appears. I read over 200 blogs but I read them through my Google-powered feedreader. Otherwise there’s no way I could keep up. Only new posts show up in my feedreader so I don’t have to click around 200-plus web sites to see if people have updated. Instead I check my feedreader two or three times a day and catch up with all of my blog readers in one fell swoop.
Keeping track of your RSS subscribers is becoming more and more important as people increasingly turn to feedreaders to help them keep track of content. RSS readers aren’t tracked in most traditional statistic tracking programs so if you’re not using a RSS statistic program, you’re going to be missing a lot of folks who read your blog. (On my own blog nearly half my readers catch up on my content through RSS.)
We use the Feedburner service on all of our client blogs and on our own blogs, too. Burning a feed with Feedburner (basically pushing your feed through their services) gives you lots of information including how many people subscribe to your feed, how many click through to your site, and what kind of feedreader they’re using to read you.
All of our clients’ blogs have RSS feeds attached to them. We help our clients customize their RSS feeds and keep track of subscribers with the Feedburner service.
We can also sit down and help you install and configure a feedreader on your own computer so you can keep up with blogs quickly and easily. Check out our blog service packages to see all we have to offer.
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