What is RSS?

RSS is nothing to look at. Really. It's a file format that a website or web service uses to make a summary of content items available to the world. Think of it like a listing of upcoming programs on your cable or satellite service. It doesn't communicate the full plot of the program, just enough to hopefully make you want to tune in. RSS is like that. A website will make available an RSS-formatted listing of recent articles with a brief summary of each, hopefully enough to make you want to read more. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Syndication is making the content of your site easily available to any other site in the world. But just like syndicated newspaper columns, just because you publish it, it doesn't mean that anyone will actually pick it up and read it. That's where you have to write compelling text. RSS just deals with the mechanics of passing summaries out to whoever asks.

An RSS feed has well-defined fields of data in it. These data fields are grouped under two large units of organization: channel and items. An RSS feed will have one channel. This is like the television channel on your cable box. It has fields about the title of the channel, description, a link to the website it came from, the copyright, etc. Within each channel are items. Think of this as the individual programs on your cable channel. The fields in an item include title (of the item this time, not the channel), description, publication date, author, a link to that content item, etc. So it may look something like:

channel
  title
  description
  link
  copyright
    item
       title
       description
       publication date
       link
    item
       title
       description
       publication date
       link

One channel can have a number of items in it. Most RSS feeds stop at about ten items per channel, generally the most recent items.