RSS Frequently Asked Questions

A: Depending on who you ask, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, but in essence it is a way to syndicate your Web content for use by other sites or end-user newsreaders and browsers. By "subscribing" to your RSS "feed", these sites and users can dynamically receive your content on a regular and real-time basis. For example, the Texas A&M News & Information group publishes stories that are put into an RSS feed. That feed is subscribed to by places like the A&M Foundation and republished on their site as part of their news section.

A: It depends. If you use a personal homepage like iGoogle or myYahoo, then you can set the page up to aggregate all of your news feeds. If not, there are a number of RSS readers on the market you can download. Many email clients will let you manage and subscribe to RSS feeds as well. Simply launch the program, choose to "add feed" or "add subscription", and enter the RSS feed Web page address.

A: On many Web portals or home pages, you can customize the site by adding feeds. Under the "add stuff" or "Personalize" tabs or links, simply click the "Add RSS Feed" link and enter the URL of the feed. Once you add the URL and click "Add" or "Submit" the feed should load up in its own channel or tab.

A: Most browsers do not offer the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed. They will, however, usually render an RSS feed so that you can read the contents and click through to the full story on a remote web site. Most will not, however, offer full subscription functionality.

A: RSS feeds can be in either format since an ".rss" file is just a specially formatted XML file. Some prefer the use of the .rss extension as it is an easier identifier of the file. Others prefer the use of .xml since that is markup language used for the file.

A: Some software applications provide built-in validation capabilities, but you can also validate using the W3C Feed Validation Service.

A: While there is that possibility, the power of syndication is that RSS feeds can open up new avenues of traffic for your information. In effect short descriptions of your stories are posted on many other web sites with links back to your site for the full story. The key is creating feeds that make the reader want to "click-through" to your site. So when you develop your feed, post a summary that entices the reader to click the link to get the rest.

A: This is a decision left up to you, the feed provider, but it really all depends where you envision your feed being used and what you want people to do when they read your feed. If you want them to travel back to your site, then go with the partial content, posting a summary only and the link to the rest of the information. If you are looking to provide end users with all of information without the need or desire for Web site traffic, then full is better for you.

A: You can set up a "robots.txt" file on your site to tell search engines not to index RSS feeds. Some search engines will not explicitly spider XML files, but to be sure, using a robots.txt file should prevent them from being scanned.

A: The RSS2.0 standards site at Harvard Law is the official repository of the latest specifications. There you'll find not only basic information regarding RSS 2.0 but also the required and optional elements that must go into your file and descriptive information about each element.