Fri 09/30

(A blogging friend did me the honor of asking for an explanation of RSS. I felt it was clear enough to offer to you and to preserve in the database for future generations. Enjoy.)

Some time ago, the world of blogs was new and lots of us were reading and writing them. Soon, we found ourselves annoyed because we had to surf to thirty sites to check our blogs of interest. A guy named Dave Winer got the idea of having a computer program scan the websites to see if anything had changed lately. On the way to implementation, he figured out that it all works better if there is a machine-readable expression of one's blog. That way you could include explicit dates, headlines, etc, so the program would be more useful.

Well, what he came up with is something called RSS. It stands for Really Simple Syndication (though there are several candidates for the true, original meaning of the acronym). Since most blogs in the modern age are database applications, it's a small matter to have the blog show on a special RSS page with tags instead of HTML tags. Doesn't look pretty but that's the difference when things are machine-readable.

There are now several aggregators that will access RSS out there. As a Mac guy, I use NetNewsWire. There's a cross-platform one called iPodder that I like. This is one of the rare instances when the Windows platform is a little behind. However, they have plenty of them, too. I just don't know about them.

Whatever you use, it will basically fulfill the function of 'subscribing'. That means telling the program the URL of you RSS feed so that it can be regularly read using HTTP. It will also organize your various feeds and present them to you for browsing.

For justkidding.com, the RSS feed is at http://www.justkidding.com/feeds/rss.xml . On my computer, just clicking on a link like that takes me to NetNewsWire where I OK the subscription and wait a few seconds while it opens the RSS web page and displays it.

So, here's the story. If you have a blog (like on blogger.com), you can safely turn on RSS without significantly increasing your exposure to the random public. It does, however, make it easier for those that are interested to keep track of your commentary.

If a blogger turns on RSS, then I would subscribe to their feed using my aggregator (sometimes also called a newsreader or podcatcher, the latter is my favorite), along with fifty other weblogs I like. One could, though I don't know if Blogger supports it, password protect your feed. I expect we'll see people doing that for money soon enough.

If you really start having fun as a blogger, you can start to make some podcasts. You could do some Garageband audio styling. Shoot, you're probably not a Mac user. Well, change that. Garageband is the perfect starter application for your audio future.

Podcasting technically is 'RSS with Enclosures'. That is, someone adds a file to the weblog and the RSS reader gets notified to drag a file along and make it available to you, usually with iTunes. Often people use a syncronized iPod to be the final delivery system to their ears. Hence, the term podcast.

Everyone assumes that video enclosures will be a common part of the feed soon. There are some websites that experiment with that now. Rocket Boom is one of them.

Here's the quickstart:

1) google up a newsreader (or click on the links above) and download it.
2) Go to justkidding.com and click, right-click, whatever, on the orange RSS and your computer will automatically open the RSS program or you may need to copy and paste.
3) Enjoy the fine experience of my bon mots in the context of a news reading program.
4) If you have a blog, go to your blog control panel, start up RSS (or Atom, a common alternative) and send me email.
5) Paste my explanation into your blog and tell people that it's there

Easy enough ain't it.

There you have it. The complete beginner's guide to RSS.

tqwhite|rss #

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