RSS, a key blog technology
October 4th, 2005
Now that I’ve joined the blogosphere, one of the things that has come to my attention is the potential usefulness of RSS feeds. An RSS feed is a method of pushing information to interested parties. So rather than go to the webpage to see if there is any news, the news would be sent to you, or at least a summary of it. It is not that different from signing up for an email announcement except it uses more modern technology.
A good overview/introduction of RSS is availalbe online. It is really easy to use, you just look for the letters RSS either in the address bar of your browser or somewhere on the page and click on it to subscribe. Subscribing to an RSS feed will not allow you to get around Chinese censors, unless you go through a third party aggregation service such as Bloglines. Even though I have heard it works, I’ve been reluctant to try it. Although Blogspot hosts numerous websites including several by my classmates such as Darlene. I can live without it, but if my site were to become banned my ability to communicate with the outside world would be seriously limited.
WordPress makes it super easy to syndicate your blog. I can’t speak for Blogger and other free services, but I imagine it is available. I certainly wouldn’t advise setting up a blog without it. Muskblog has RSS feeds, I’ve tested it and they work. Just scroll way down and subscribe to the posts and even the comments if you want to. Opera my browser of choice handles them no problem as does Safari, if you’re not using Opera or not using a Mac well I’m sure Microsoft will get around to implementing support for RSS some time this century.
Update: I eventually put a lot of time and effort into leveraging RSS feeds first for my job search then for my website, and now I’ve upgraded to WordPress 5.0 and I continue to rely on RSS to make my blog indexable and my homepage snazzy.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Information Technology and tagged: Blogging, RSS, WordPress.
Many, many, many years later I’m still a big fan of RSS feeds and even Atom feeds. I use them extensively to keep up to date on topics that interest me, even building some specialty news aggregators.