nairaland.net

What is RSS?
What does it mean to the user?
What does it mean to the webmaster?

All the tech definitions are out there, but I'll try to explain it in simple terms.

What is RSS?

It's a system that allows you to pull information from different websites, and view them all on one page.

What does it mean to the user?

RSS let's the user view information from various sources, without actually visiting the individual websites.

What does it mean to the webmaster?

RSS let's the webmaster broadcast changes to his website, as they happen.  Users see those changes, and if interested, can now follow a link to the site for more details.

How does a user create his own RSS page?

1. By installing a desktop RSS reader. http://www.lights.com/weblogs/rss.html

2. By signing up for an online RSS service.  Examples are:
http://my.yahoo.com, http://my.msn.com, http://www.google.com/ig/

Let me walk you through yahoo.

You need a yahoo account to do this.

You also need an RSS url.  Use mine: http://www.oasisoflove.com/rss.xml

Login to my.yahoo.com

1. Click add content.
2. Click  Add RSS by URL
3. Paste this into the url field: http://www.oasisoflove.com/rss.xml

Now you should see headlines of profiles from my website.

From then on, anytime new profiles are posted on my site, you would also see the change in your my.yahoo.com rss reader.

To add more rss feeds, just repeat steps 1-3 above, with the address of the new feed you want to add. 

You know a website offers rss feed if you see buttons like this:

[img]http://www.oasisoflove.com/images/addtomyyahoo4.gif[/img], [img]http://www.oasisoflove.com/images/xml-articles.gif[/img], [img]http://www.oasisoflove.com/images/xml-profiles.gif[/img]

The address of the rss feed for this forum is:

http://www.nairaland.net/forum/rss.php

How can a webmaster create an rss feed for his website?

First of all, if your website content doesn't change often, providing an rss feed would be meaningless.

To create rss feed for your website, you need to know XML.  XML is easy if you already know HTML.

Now, to learn rss, just search for good tutorials online.  You can also look at other people's rss files and modify it for your own use. See mine: http://www.oasisoflove.com/rss.xml

Each time there is new information on your website you want to share, all you have to do is add it to your rss file, and everybody subscribing to your rss feed will know immediately.  You can automate the process if you know web scripting like php, asp, etc.

Webmasters, if you create an rss feed for your site, let us know about it.

RSS feed for nairaland.net is:

http://www.nairaland.net/forum/rss.php