What is RSS?

As you guys know that Balkhis is growing both on the web as well as in the local community. Well a lot of people that I talk to at my university don’t really know what RSS is. Because whenever I am talking to people they are like what do you mean by RSS Subscribers, or subscribe to RSS. So I decided to write about this article as a resource for starters.

What is RSS?

Many people have different definitions of RSS. Well it really stands for Really Simple Syndication. Some people say it is Rich Site Summary, and as one of my teacher said it means Really Simply Stupid. Anyways, RSS is a way for you to get updated on the site that you like to read every day. Millions of internet users use it because they don’t want to stay in old time system where you had to bookmark the site and check them back manually.

Why you should use RSS?

I am sure you value your time just as much as I value my time. I don’t have time to visit each site individually multiple times in a day to check for updates. Instead, I would just like to have all of them at one place, so I can check it all at once rather than wasting my time. So save your time and just use RSS.

Seriously, all it is that you subscribe to a magazine, and it is delivering you the updates. Rather a daily edition of that magazine. Because blogs really are a smaller version of the magazines. So if you like to save time, then start subscribing to RSS feeds. As we say in webmaster niche, Time is Money. So use it wisely, and one way to use it wisely is subscribing to RSS feeds.

Another good part about RSS is that you don’t get to see the annoying ads. You know some sites that you really like the content off, but have really ugly look and distracting ads. Well, this is your solution. Use RSS to subscribe. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to subscribe to RSS. It is really easy. Let me teach you how.

How to use RSS?

All you need is a RSS reader. I myself use Google Reader, and Planetaki. Next thing you need to do is find an RSS Icon on other sites. They look something like these:

Click on them, and try to subscribe through your reader. Some readers just ask you to place the feed url.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Balkhis – So start by practicing with Balkhis url

Now you can either do that through readers, or you can do that through emails. Email option is very simple. All you have to do is enter your email address, and verify that. Then you will receive emails whenever that site updates. Note: Feedburner does not spam, so you don’t have to worry about that.

This option is also available at Balkhis in the sidebar.

Disadvantages of RSS

The only disadvantage that I can think off is that it gets confusing when you have about 50 websites that you are subscribed to, so my advice is that keep the number to be about 10. You might miss information because I notice that when people have a lot of stuff to go over, they tend to skim through the content. Other than that I don’t see any disadvantage of using RSS.

Tools for Webmasters and Bloggers

RSS is one of the ways that people measure success of the blog. The more subscribers you have the better your blog is considered. To get more subscribers, you need to check the following resources:

Best Design Practices of RSS and Free Icon Collection

How you can find new RSS Subscribers for your Blog

How to add an email subscription box to your blog

This is a beginners guide, so ignore if you don’t like it. Feel free to add your comments because I know this is a very broad topic, and I covered it in a very short post.