Make money blogging in South Africa

I’m sure you have seen these orange buttons on the web sometime or another, or have seen a link saying “subscribe to RSS”, but don’t have a clue of what it is? Well let me explain.

One very powerful, yet simple technology

Think of RSS like your email inbox. Whenever something happens regarding your line of work, someone fires off an email to you. RSS works on the same principle in that when content on a website changes, the RSS feed changes, and you will – depending on how you “subscribe” to the RSS feed – will be informed of the new content or changes.

The main difference between the two is that you must subscribe to RSS, so that you will only receive updates to websites you want to read, than an email, where you are going to get the new information no matter what!

The benefits of using RSS mean that you never have to visit all your favourite websites to find out if anything has changed, you just open your RSS reader, and all your feeds that have been updated, will be shown as updated, and you can then go ahead and read it – all without having to visit tons of websites!

The technical stuff

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It is generated in XML, which is a generic specification for data formats. There are 3 different specifications of RSS feeds, namely RSS1.0, RSS2.0 and Atom. All 3 differ slightly in their structure, but they all serve the exact same purpose of syndicating content. More details can be found over at the RSS wikipedia entry or Harvard university’s take on RSS. Yaro Starak, (more on him at a later stage), has also written a very good post on RSS, which you might also like to read for more substance.

RSS readers

With a technology as widely adopted as RSS, there are tons of RSS Readers on the web, but in my books, there are only 2 that I can recommend. Bloglines and Google Reader.

I have used both of them, and can say that they both do the job very well. They are both extremely easy to setup, and easy to manage. Personally I use Bloglines, and have been for over a year now. Try them both out, and let me know what you think.

There is one other angle to RSS readers that has popped up in the last 3 months, and that is an RSS reader built into your browser! Yes, thats right, in Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7, you can now subscribe to feeds straight from your browser, and can manage your feeds from there. Click on the feed icon in the browsers address bar, and follow the instructions. The reason I would still choose a web-based feed reader like Bloglines over your browsers built-in feed reader, is that you can access your feeds from anywhere in the world, and you are not limited to the computer that your browser is installed on.

Subscribe to my feed!

Now that you understand RSS, how it works, and how you can subscribe to RSS feeds, subscribe to my blog’s feed. There are 2 ways of subscribing. Click this link – http://feeds.feedburner.com/probloggingcoza or click on the RSS icon in your address bar and follow the instructions. Then whenever I write a new article here, you will be the first to know about it, using your RSS feed reader!

Here’s is to you reading more RSS feeds!
Jason Bagley