Script: About RSS Feeds
Overview
This courselet explains RSS feeds.
Audio Script – About RSS
S1 0:0.025: What is RSS?
S5 0:3.000: There are two answers to this question. One is a dry technical description, and the other one is about how it is really used today.
S10 0:11.100: To start with the dry answer, RSS is an optional additional service which many websites offer that have regularly changing article-style content. Examples are news sites or blogs.
S15 0:24:250: A news or a blog website delivers articles to your webbrowser.
S20 0:28.050: All news articles consist of a headline and the actual article. News articles on websites often have lots of graphics or even an embedded video, and are styled in the elaborate design of the respective website.
S25 0:42.330: RSS feeds on the other hand contain almost nothing but „pure information“. An RSS feed for all articles on the website transmits the headline, a short description of the article and a link to the article on the website.
S30 0:56.300: Your RSS reader combines lots of RSS feeds from many very different websites and displays them to you in one style, minus all the fancy graphics, colors and styles that have no other purpose than to establish a „unique corporate design“ of the visited website, when all you really care about is the news and not which corporate entity delivers it!
S35 1:18.100: Each item also includes a link to the full article on the website.
S40 1:22.500: By clicking on it your webbrowser opens, loads and displays that article.
S45 1:27.700: Here are two other examples for RSS readers. Both are web-based – everything on the Internet can be processed on the Internet! The first one is Google reader.
S50 1:38.640: The other one is integrated with an Email client just like Thunderbird combines Email and RSS capabilities – only that everything takes place on the web. You can see that all those RSS readers display the articles differently, according to their own preferred style instead of the style of the websites those articles come from. This and the focus on headlines makes the RSS service and RSS readers a great tool for browsing through lots of different articles on lots of very different websites in a very short time.
[Pause 2s]
S55 2:11.500: That brings us back to the still missing second possible description of RSS, which is more philosophical: It is the perfect tool for news junkies, i.e. people whose work-lives are more boring than what evolution equipped and prepared us for, and who therefore desperately try to fill the missing action in their lives by looking at news about action others are involved in.
[Pause 2s]
S60 2:37.650: Now that you know what RSS is and what it is good for, what do you need to tell your RSS reader to be able to use an RSS feed?
S65 2:50.650: First, you need to know if the website in question offers this service in the first place. Look for the letters RSS or for this small icon, which is the generally agreed-upon icon for RSS feeds which even Microsoft agreed to use!
S70 3:7.500: Every website is different, so you are going to have to look for the RSS feed. Modern webbrowsers show the RSS feed icon when the website offers RSS, although it is possible to find websites without this indicator that still offer RSS.
S75 3:21.100: For your RSS-reader you need the URL of the RSS-feed, which looks like this and always starts with „http“, just like any address on the Web. We show how to actually do this in the hands-on demonstration section.
[Pause 2s]
S100 3:36.650: Well, this is all you need to know about RSS!