RSS - What it is, What it does

And one more, this time about RSS:

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Things you can do with RSS:

1. Display items from an RSS feed on your site. For example, if there’s a source that publishes an RSS feed of the latest petroleum news you could embed those news items in your web site so that whenever users came to your page they would see the latest news headlines. You can do this using an “RSS to HTML” conversion tool like the one at http://feed2js.org/. You give them the location of the XML file of the RSS feed, and they convert it into HTML, javascript, or PHP code that you can add to your website to display the content of the feed.
2. Provide links to your users so that they can subscribe to RSS feeds that were created by other sites. This assumes that you have users who already know what RSS is and why they want it, or that you will provide information somewhere on the page about how to subscribe to an RSS feed. For example, some of the publishers you link to on your TOC page already publish their TOCs as an RSS feed. Your users could find this by browsing around the publisher’s web site, or you could provide a link to the RSS feed directly on your page in the same way ACS does here (http://pubs.acs.org/alerts/rss/index.html). One potential problem is if a site that you link to stops publishing its feed or changes the URL, you won’t know until someone tries to subscribe to the feed and gets a message that says it doesn’t exist anymore. Basically, it’s the same problem one always has when linking to sites outside of your control.
3. Create RSS feeds for your own content. This is useful if you publish information that your users might like to subscribe to. For example, do you send out an email with a list of new library acquisitions? You could also offer a new books RSS feed for those who want to get the content that way. Or you could create an RSS feed for new “In the Spotlight” announcements. Your new catalog system might have the ability to automatically generate RSS feeds of new content. This would be something to check with the programmer about. For your library website, you could use a tool like List Garden (http://www.softwaregarden.com/products/listgarden/), an application that sits on your computer desktop and can be used to make RSS feeds when you don’t have a program that automatically generates them.

I’ve written the following as something you could possibly email to the company when you introduced RSS to give people who don’t know about it an idea of what it can do and how to get started:

Why RSS? And what is it?

When you think RSS, think “Really Simple Syndication,” an easy way to receive news and information from your favorite websites. Do you have a list of websites that you check for new information? Do you find yourself forgetting to check them, or checking them, but finding nothing new? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a personal “newspaper” that would check your favorite sites and bring you all the news in one place, as it’s published? Well, that’s what an RSS reader does.

How to get started reading news the RSS way

Here’s what you need to get started with RSS:

1. An RSS news reader. This is the software that checks the pages and tells you when there’s something new. You might want to try Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) or Google Reader (http://reader.google.com).
2. The RSS feeds from the websites you want to keep tabs on. Some websites still don’t publish an RSS feed, but it’s usually easy to figure out if they do. The next time you’re browsing a website look for an image like this: or this: or this: . Clicking on that link will usually take you to a strange looking page like this: http://apartmenttherapy.com/index.xml That’s the RSS page, and it’s where your news reader gets the information about what’s new on that website. It may look odd to you, but don’t worry. It makes perfect sense to your news reader.
   

First you need to set up your news reader and create an account. Bloglines, for example, will walk you through the process of registering and creating a username and password, so you’ll be able to keep your account private. You’ll usually get an email at the account that you registered with asking you to verify that you want to create the account. Next you’ll need to add the “feeds” you want to follow. These are the RSS pages published by the sites your interested in. When you tell your news reader that you want to add a feed, it will ask you for the URL. This is when you copy and paste the URL that you found on the site you want to follow. Some web sites will give you a button you can click to add their feed to your news reader. For example, this page on CNN’s site has buttons that will automatically add the feed to whichever news reader you use: http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss. Once you’ve subscribed to a site you’ll see the newest articles in your RSS reader. As more new articles are published, they’ll show up too, without you ever having to go back to the page that they came from. Most readers have a way to keep an article new, or to save it if you want to read it later. Add the RSS feeds from all the sites you usually check, and pretty soon you’ll be getting a constantly up to date personal newspaper that has exactly the news you want.