What is RSS?

How to set yourself up as an on-demand radio station or syndicated columnist

Podcast: What is RSS? (not yet ready)

Transcript:

RSS, which originally stood for "Rich Site Summary" quickly got a more commercially useful name, "Really Simple Syndication." RSS, and its more-developed cousin, Atom, is really nothing more than a set of pre-defined XML tags. Learn the tags, or copy them, and you're set to let people subscribe to your podcasts, blogs, or website changes.

What is XML?
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) uses "tags" that describe the information they contain, like this: <booktitle>The Kite Runner</booktitle>. "Tags" are markers embedded in a document that indicate the purpose, content or appearance of the marked content. Tags are used in pairs (a tagset), with a beginning tag <...> and an end tag </...>.

Anyone can make up XML tags, and if you know what the tags are, you can format them for viewing in a browser. When groups of people want to share information, it's important that they have a common understanding of the tags being used. As a result, people have defined various XML vocabularies, or DTDs (Data Type Definitions). Whole industries often share the same XML tags so that data sharing becomes possible up and down the supply chain. RSS is one of those vocabularies, or DTDs. RSS is used by people to create "feeds" of blog entries, podcasts, or news stories.

Setting up a simplified RSS feed
When we started making an RSS feed, we found the simplest possible set of RSS tags, just to see if it really worked, and it does! Here is that simplified set:

<item>
<title>your episode title goes here </title>
<link>http://www.yourURL.com/episodename.htm</link>
<description>Enter a description for this episode.</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:54:51 GMT</pubDate>
</item>

<item>
<title>your second episode title goes here </title>
<link>http://www.yourURL.com/episode2name.htm</link>
<description>Enter a description for this episode.</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 30 Nov 2006 10:32:46 GMT</pubDate>
</item>

</channel>

In a way, XML (and RSS, being one kind of XML) is like a database. Each "item" is a record in the "channel" database, and the tags "title", "link", "description", and "pubDate" are the fields. You can have as many "items" as you like - they're your shows.

If you want to set up an RSS feed, you could start by copying our XML feed, which has a couple of bonus extras. (If you are using IE7, when you click on the link it will be formatted already, so you'll have to "view source" to see the XML.) We found out how to include an image, and learned that it is good to include the "guid" (Globally Unique Identifier), which is the spot you intend to keep the show on a permanent basis. In our case, it's the same as the "link", but if you are a newspaper, the article may appear on your what's new page for a few days or weeks, then be stored somewhere else permanently. Also note the extra information at the top (and bottom), which you will definitely need.

Take a look at a sample feed from MIT as well, to see how you can link directly to your MP3 podcast, instead of linking to a web page, as we do.

Okay, I've set up a feed. How do I read it?
There are several good "feed aggregators" out there. Most of them get downloaded and installed on your desktop, where you can subscribe to your favorite feeds and then read them or listen to them whenever you want. You can also download an extension (for example, "Sage") for FireFox that will format the feeds so that you can read them in your FireFox browser, or use IE7, as we mentioned, which formats them automatically. Google Reader is also a popular tool for reading feeds.

Links of Interest

This transcript was written on April 24, 2007.