Yesterday we introduced the very first Domozych Media podcast. Today we wanted to talk a little bit about Really Simple Syndication, or ‘RSS’, and how it can help your site not only maintain an audience, but actually grow your web presence. Here’s a link to our feed validation results which show our podcast feed is easily readable across any RSS reader. And here’s a link to our actual RSS feed. When we build a fully functional site for you, there’s a number of feeds which will be accessible and we will be able to repurpose those feeds across a number of other third-party sites, some of which I highlighted in an earlier post.
For today’s example I want to focus on the site FriendFeed, #18 on that list of 67 social media networking sites, a site which was recently acquired by the larger social network Facebook. Here you can see the FriendFeed site for the book The Art of Memetics, which incorporates a number of different RSS feeds from several different sources. Being able to combine RSS feeds from your dynamic pages, such as those produced through the blog’s content management structure, or those pages created as you add new products to your shopping cart, creates an additional RSS feed which can then be folded into the front page of your site, or republished on a dedicated Twitter profile, or reused across any one of those other ‘lifestream’ style social networks that are listed on that previous post.
RSS began over a decade ago as RDF, but within a few months was renamed. It remained a somewhat obscure use of XML until blogging became a widespread approach to content management, at which point RSS adoption grew and the competitor Atom also drove developer’s interest in designing cross-compatible readers that regular people (i.e., non-techies) could easily configure to keep up to date with news and information from their favorite sites. Take a moment to review the history of RSS on wikipedia if you’d like to learn more.
Today, every major browser incorporates an RSS reader, and there are a number of stand-alone RSS readers as well. Sites like Yahoo and Google incorporate RSS readers on their home pages, and software, such as iTunes, relies on RSS to keep up to date with podcasts. Updating your static site to incorporate RSS feeds can help you to maintain an audience over time, as well as provide an avenue for you to announce specials or updates to your products or services.
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