RSS Feeds Service

What is an RSS Feed

(Really Simple Syndication) A syndication format that was developed by Netscape in 1999 and became very popular for aggregating updates to blogs and the latest news from web sites. RSS has also stood for "Rich Site Summary" and "RDF Site Summary."

RSS is a part of the XML family file formats for web syndication used by news web sites and blogs. They are used to provide items containing short descriptions of web content together with a link to the full version of the content. This information is delivered as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.

RSS is widely used by the blogging community to share the latest entries' headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files such as podcasts, vidcasts, photofeeds and MP3's (please see our Blog service and our Podcast, Vidcast and Photofeed service).

A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well as many smaller ones.

Client-side readers and aggregators are typically constructed as standalone programs or extensions to existing programs like web browsers.

Web-based feed readers and news aggregators require no software installation and make the user's "feeds" available on any computer with Internet access. Some aggregators syndicate (combine) RSS feeds into new feeds, e.g. take all football related items from several sports feeds and provide a new football feed. There are also search engines for RSS feeds like Google Blog Search, Technorati or Bloglines.

RSS feeds are typically linked to with an orange rectangle with the letters XML or RSS .

Advantages and Disadvantages of an RSS Feed

The Advantages to the reader of RSS feeds is there is no need to specify their email address or any other personal information when they subscribe to an RSS feed. Because of this, the potential risk of receiving more spam is totally avoided. I should point out that in practice the risk of incurring additional spam with the well-known reputable computer and Internet related email newsletters is negligible or non-existent.

The person reading the RSS feeds has complete and immediate control at all times over which feeds they subscribe to. If they don't like a feed for any reason, they can unsubscribe from it and that action will take effect immediately and forever, unless they decide to re-subscribe in the future. As soon as they unsubscribe, they will immediately and totally cease to receive any further information from that source.

Subscribing and unsubscribing from RSS feeds always takes place immediately. These operations never involve a two-stage confirmation process as is usually required with automated email newsletter subscriptions.

The reader will only receive the RSS feeds they have subscribed to. They will never receive any spam on RSS.

RSS feeds only contain the material included by it's creators. There is no spam, no advertisements and no flame wars (pointless heated arguments) unless the feed creator includes them in the feed. In general, feed creators only include acceptable material, knowing that users can unsubscribe so easily. Most free RSS feeds include a few relevant advertisements which provide a source of income to the feeds' creators. If you find any material in an RSS feed unacceptable, just unsubscribe from that feed.

RSS feeds will never be lost due to ISP's or programs running on the reader's computer filtering out genuine messages, mistaking them for spam.

RSS feeds tend to only have very simple formatting. This makes them quicker to load and easier to read than web pages or HTML formatted emails. However, RSS feeds can and often do contain hypertext links.

RSS feeds can contain images but in practice these are used very sparingly. This makes feeds faster to load. If you have a modem connection then you can always unsubscribe from a feed which regularly includes numerous large images.

If you don't access some editions of feeds, those editions will be lost as soon as a new edition is published. For example, if a feed is updated daily and you fail to access it while you are on holiday for a week, there is no way of accessing those past editions (unless the feed creator makes them available on their web site).

Feeds will not be stored on a server or in an inbox waiting for you to download and read them, however, it is technically possible that a program could download and store feeds on a regular basis, provided the computer is switched on. It is also technically feasible that a program running on another computer could perform this task for you. As far as I know neither of these facilities are actually available at present.

RSS feeds often include many old items. In most cases new items are inserted at the top and old items dropped off the bottom. In many cases items are not dated, even though it is technically extremely easy to do so. This means that you often find yourself reading the same items repeatedly, or having to scroll down past old items. To avoid this, some RSS feed readers provide a means of marking items which have been read, so that they are not displayed in the future.

Sometimes feeds only contain a very brief title, with a hypertext link to the full text. For people reading feeds while online this can be an advantage but for people reading feeds offline it is a very serious disadvantage. However, many feeds contain larger extracts and some feeds contain the full text of every item. In some cases you can even decide which style of feed you prefer to subscribe to. Descriptive names such as "Full Version" and "Lite Version" are often used.

Finding RSS feeds can be difficult. They do not tend to appear on normal search engines and they tend to be tucked away on web sites. However, most RSS feed reader programs provide a means of displaying lists of RSS feeds.

The process of subscribing to RSS feeds requires the ability to copy and paste a URL into an RSS feed reader program. In many cases, web pages listing the URL's of RSS feeds do not explain this process.

What we do for you

We’ll setup an RSS feed on your website so that visitors can subscribe and we'll place your RSS Feed in various related directories and Search Engines.

What we need from you

All we require is the item you wish to feed (e.g. Blog, Podcast etc.).

If you require any advertising or sponsorship to be added, please contact our designers who will help decide how best to add these to your feed.

The Products

RSS 2.0
RSS is a dialect of XML, and is used for syndicating web content and metadata. RSS 0.91 is the most commonly used of several versions available. For new RSS feeds, it's better to use version 2.0 because it is the current spec and it's backward compatible with 0.91.

RSS FEEDS COSTS £70.