RSS Reason

I thought it was time to delve a bit further into the world of content this week. With the beginning of the school holidays there is always a small lull before the Edinburgh Festival. That, and the culmination of the HIE Moray Seminars has given me a little bit of time to help catch-up or get ahead of the game a bit.

So I've been spending some rainy afternoons exploring RSS feeds.

As I mentioned in my previous post and extensively in the seminars, Content is King.
But it can be difficult to find good content or to generate it easily. Blogs are the first port of call. But then how do you get people to read it.

The simple answer is by using RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This converts the content of your blog, website, podcast etc. into a format which is easy to incorporate into many forms of RSS Readers.

Subscribing to Feeds:

Your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird), your browser (Firefox's Live Bookmarks), Google, My Yahoo, Bloglines and many other stand alone applications can all read RSS feeds.

Simply find a feed you want to subscribe to and you'll receive the content as it is updated.

For example, using Firefox you can see the little RSS symbol in the address bar -


Simply click on this and you'll be taken to a subscription page -



Simply select the application you want to use to read the Feed, in this case Firefox's Live Bookmarks, and hey presto you have a subscription.

So this is part one of the RSS info, the next part is discovering how to generate a feed and how to get it noticed.