Rss newsletter what. What is RSS, in simple words about the service for automatic content distribution. Optional RSS Feed Elements
RSS helps you to receive information very easily, conveniently and quickly from this blog, and in principle, RSS subscription is present on almost all blogs. So, you need to understand how to use it for your convenience and ease of work.
It often happens that you go to your favorite blogs (sites) to find out “is there anything new?” Yes, of course, if you read less than 5 blogs, it won’t be so difficult for you to go through them all. But when there are dozens of such blogs (sites), going through them is terribly inconvenient: you waste quite a lot of time, and if your Internet is not yet “unlimited,” then you are also losing money. Therefore, using RSS is very convenient. I’ll tell you how to put it on a feed in one of the future lessons, but now find out what RSS is.
Pros of RSS subscription
- You won't have to worry about forgetting about some of your favorite blogs that you might miss important information for you;
- You will receive updates instantly, you will have time to follow your “favorite” blogs;
- You won't have to remember what the last note was and look where new ones start.
How to use RSS
- Subscribe to RSS feed. I prefer to use this method and I think it is more convenient and easier.
But RSS subscription is a little different depending on your browser (Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, etc.).
To begin with, I’ll consider the option in Opera (since I think it’s the most convenient for surfing (visiting pages for the purpose of reading, i.e. for ordinary readers).RSS subscription in Opera (Opera)
Look for RSS subscription badges on the blog. On my blog they look like this:
Or you can find the second button with right side in the upper part, where the same RSS subscription icon is “hidden”: 
Click on any of the subscription buttons you like, and in Opera you will see something like the following window:
Click on the "Subscribe" button (shown with an arrow in the picture above). And now you can check for updates on the blog by clicking “Feeds” in Opera
Select in the “feeds” the blog to which you have subscribed and you will see a window where there will be a list of recent articles, and the article itself, and at the end a link to this article, if you read, prefer to read notes from the site (marked with an arrow, link to article):
You are now subscribed to the blog's RSS feed! Congratulations!RSS subscription in other browsers
In Opera and Mozilla, an RSS subscription icon will appear next to the address bar.
And in Internet Explorer it is located just below:
By clicking this icon, a new window will open and click subscribe in it:
Click "Subscribe" again:
Now you are subscribed to the RSS feed, to view it, open a new window, click “Favorites” and select “Web Feeds” there:
And in Mozilla Firefox this subscription will appear in the "Bookmarks Bar": 
- Another way: Subscribe to email. In this case, blog updates will be sent to your email box(email). Let's look at an example of such a subscription.
First, enter your email in the special field:
Next, click the “Subscribe” button. 
As a result, a window should appear and in a special field we enter the word that is shown in the picture (these actions are against spam): 
Click on the "Complete Subscription Request" button 
Next, if the following window appears: 
We again enter the word on the picture in the field, as in the previous step. If you did everything correctly, the following window should appear: 
Now you need to confirm your email, that is, “prove” that the email you entered is yours. Check your email, there should be a letter there, and click on the link (shown by the arrow) to confirm your email. 
By clicking on the link a window will appear: 
Congratulations, you have successfully subscribed to blog updates to your email. Now you will always be aware of blog updates!
In the future, I will tell you how to subscribe to RSS via Yandex feed and Google Reader. And now you can subscribe to RSS of my blog - EASY! Thanks to this technology you will save a lot of time and nerves! Believe me, reading RSS will be a pleasure for you :).
From this article you will learn about Really Simple Syndication (RSS, PSS) technology. I'll tell you what it is in general, what RSS feed and channels are. How to organize an RSS newsletter so that people can subscribe to the RSS channel of your blog through an RSS reader.
What kind of technology is this, RSS?
RSS is a group of XML formats that are used for brief or complete presentation of news announcements, article feeds, new blog posts, etc.
The abbreviation RSS stands for differently, depending on the version:
- RSS 0.9х - enriched summary of site news from English. Rich Site Summary;
- RSS 0.9 and 1.0 - a summary of the feed of site posts using the metastructure of website descriptions from English. RDF Site Summary;
- RSS 2.x - really simple distribution from English. Really Simple Syndication.
The direct purpose of RSS 2.0 is to broadcast, publish a short description for information and a link to the full version of the content on the web. However, sites often post entire articles directly to the RSS feed for the convenience of users. Yes, because of this they lose some share of attendance and income, but what can’t be done for the sake of readers. Other sites do the opposite - they cut off the announcement of a new article at the most interesting part, forcing the reader to follow the link to view this content in its entirety.
I won't list modern browsers(you know them yourself) who know how to work with RSS feeds, because ALL browsers, without exception, can do this. Able to download data from RSS and email clients such as Thunderbird, Outlook.
The first sign before the appearance of this format appeared in 1995. The prototype of the framework was called “Metacontent”. And already in 1997, the technology that we now understand as PCC became famous thanks to Netscape. Netscape used it when filling its Netcenter portal, and since... The Netscape Navigator browser was one of the most popular at that time - it was a loud PR.
And after a couple of years - in 1999. - major media outlets use RSS 0.90 to broadcast content on their news sites: Disney, BBC, Forbes, CNET, Wired and CNN.
Subsequently, the RSS technology development groups were divided and what we know now as RSS 2.0 is the most successful version, based on version 0.91. Its main difference from another branch with a complex RDF description is its ease of adoption by people and developers. The New York Times appreciated it and off we went. So much so that in 2006 a competitive format matured - Atom (used in Blogger, Blogspot.com).
All this (several XML formats of this kind) significantly complicates the life of service developers and software for reading RSS - after all, programs must understand several formats for presenting text, dates and metadata at once and work with all of them.
RSS-feed on the site: feed, stream, channel, newsletter
Feed, RSS feed, RSS feed, RSS stream, RSS channel, RSS newsletter are synonyms and mean the same thing. One way or another, the presence of such terms in the site design means that the site provides the ability to subscribe to updates in RSS format.
Unfortunately, not everyone understands the benefits of having an RSS feed on a website. Now we will change that. Guys, using RSS subscriptions is very convenient! I understand that now there are VKontakte news feeds, many sites maintain their own public pages and provide links to new materials.
Here RSS is about the same thing, only it is done automatically, publishes news in the order of release, is built into many engines and allows readers to use the readers of their own choice (review of popular RSS readers).
Many people don't use RSS because it seems complicated. You accidentally click the RSS XML feed icon on the site, a crook appears in the browser window, and you run away in a panic without figuring out what it is and why. Do not do it this way.
By subscribing to RSS, the reader will be aware of all the new content on your site (they will be sent to him in the mail or reader) - but only those that will be specified in the settings for adding to the feed, i.e. Some sections can be excluded from the newsletter.
What happens if you click on this icon? Nothing bad will happen:
At the top right you will see a list of RSS readers for subscription, and at the bottom there will be the same news feed, sorted in descending order by newness. This is how the XML-RSS feed appears, having already been automatically processed through the XML Feedburner processing service. The advantage of feedburner is that you can modify and improve the news feed, as well as monitor the number of RSS subscribers of the site.
At the same time, you can set advanced subscription methods when creating an RSS feed on the Feedburner service website - including subscribing to RSS by email. There is no need to confuse regular RSS newsletters with RSS-to-email; in regular ones you need to use programs and services, in RSS-to-email - email.
This is what the information about the ability to subscribe by email looks like so that new items from the RSS feed are sent to your email:
And the convenience is no worse than VKontakte subscriptions. By using RSS, you will no longer need to regularly check multiple sites for updates - you will be able to read the latest content as soon as it is released. And all this is automatic - both for you and for the site owner. That is, users solve the problem of simultaneous access to news from several sites, and site owners solve the problem of instantly notifying hundreds or thousands of users about the availability of new web content.
Applications, browsers, readers and aggregators for reading RSS
On the Internet, as SaaS and individual programs, there are special web and mobile applications- they aggregate information from RSS feeds so you can read it. That's what they call RSS readers and RSS aggregators. They are on smartphones personal computers(desktops) and tablets - you can choose to suit your taste.
Service sites like Liferea, Snarfer, NewsAlloy, Reeder, FeedBucket, QuiteRSS, The Old Reader, AOL Reader, RSSOwl, NetVibes, FeedDemon, Kanban, Digg Reader, Feedly, Inoreader, My Yahoo, Tiny Tiny RSS, Omea Reader, NewzCrawler, NewsBlur are aggregators or readers - they allow the user to collect RSS information from multiple sources.
The largest online readers-aggregators such as Yandex.Subscriptions (Yandex.Lenta) or Google Reader have been closed for a long time - it’s fun and funny to read articles about RSS readers in 2016 containing “Go to Yandex.Subscriptions”, “It’s easy to use RSS - first open Google Reader."
Representatives of Yandex and Google motivated the closure by “too expensive service,” but in reality the reason is more likely that RSS readers do not bring media coverage and income to search engines.
For Yandex, it turned out to be more important that users read sites that have been moderated in Yandex.News, rather than being able to form their own preferences. Fortunately, many applications and services have appeared to solve this problem.
For example, the same phones and browsers on PCs may well load RSS feed headers for their users. I did this back in ancient Firefox and on Nokia’s Symbian, when there was no trace of Google Chrome and iPhones! What can we say about 2016? Technology has advanced and life has become better - there is much more choice. Not to mention the fact that all modern browsers can load RSS.
It is not even necessary to install special software or register with services; there are browser plugins that solve this problem. For Chrome, this plugin is called RSS feed reader - it pulls news headlines directly into the browser, very convenient.
Such plugins are also available for other browsers.
In Internet Explorer, the RSS subscription icon is located in the menu. By clicking on it you will be taken to the RSS channel page and can subscribe by clicking on the subscribe button in the upper left corner. Updates will be sent to the "Channels" tab, which can be found in the "Favorites" (located in the sidebar). Sites with unread updates will be flagged.
In Mozilla Firefox, the icon is located in the address bar, where you can subscribe to RSS feed updates that will come directly to the browser. Opera (before the transition to the Chromium/Blink engine) also used to have a similar system, very convenient for users - with structuring for users and a message about updates appearing in the lower right corner.
Previously, 4–6% of Internet users used RSS, but now the percentage has decreased for two reasons - firstly, the number of Internet users has grown significantly; secondly, not everyone likes this format of interaction, but the format of social networks and instant messengers was to their liking.
It’s very strange, because subscribing to an RSS channel is no more complicated than subscribing to a feed in Telegram - users just need to insert the address of the feed they are interested in into the reader or aggregator and that’s it, the subscription is completed. Receiving RSS by email is no more difficult: enter the address in the field, confirm your subscription, and receive news.
That's all, I wish you good luck. Subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog of seven bloggers -
The technology must be said to be very simple and effective. You don't need any effort to start using it. First of all, let's understand how this system works. This will allow you to understand and appreciate the full benefits and value of news feeds.
How RSS works
This is an xml data format that allows you to monitor website updates on the Internet.
A few years ago, any serious website provided the ability to subscribe to its RSS feed. Nowadays there is a trend of “obsolescence”; websites have stopped making RSS feeds and the familiar orange icon can be found less and less often. But this did not make RSS itself any worse.
I myself did not use this technology for a long time, because I thought that I did not need it. But after trying it once, I realized that I had lost a lot by not starting to use it earlier. What have I lost? Time!
Surely you have favorite sites that you visit periodically, read articles and news, and follow updates.
Each site periodically publishes some content - articles, news, comments. Subscription
to the site's RSS news feed allows you to learn about updates on this site as quickly as possible, without having to visit and view the site itself. It's akin to looking at the headlines of the morning newspaper. Why go to the site and browse it in search of news, if you can view announcements of these articles on your computer, and if you find interesting material, follow the link to the latest article, the title of which will certainly be in the RSS feed. Not only does this save a lot of time, it also reduces traffic, because you only go to the site if you are really interested in something.
RSS aggregator
News feeds are being processed special programs- RSS aggregators. There are two types of aggregators: web services and programs on your computer. Which one to choose is a matter of taste. Online aggregators are somewhat similar in functionality to postal services— you create an account on the Internet on one of the services, and all your feeds will arrive in the box on your account. This method is good because you will always have access to your feeds, no matter where you are. But they have the disadvantage that you still have to go and check the box. That is, to find out about news or subscribe to a new feed, you need to open the aggregator service page in your browser.
Local RSS aggregators
Therefore, there are even more convenient ones - local RSS aggregators, which can be built into the browser, mailer, or be a separate application. If you know what it is mail program, then you will understand the advantage of news feeds. A local aggregator allows you to follow news much more efficiently - you receive updates on sites almost instantly. Local RSS aggregators themselves “run” to the site and if something new appears there, they “bring” you the title or announcement of the article, and sometimes the entire article - it depends on what kind of feed the site provides.
I once used just such an aggregator, built into the Opera browser - a very convenient thing. However, in this moment this functionality has been moved from the Opera browser to separate application— Opera Mail. Yes, and ourselves Opera browser I don't use it anymore.
How to subscribe to RSS
To subscribe to the news feed of your favorite site, you need to find a link to the RSS feed on this site. Usually it is made in the form of a small pictogram that looks like this. This is the traditional RSS notation.
RSS and Internet browsers
At the moment, among the popular browsers, only Mozilla has implemented the ability to process RSS news feeds.
Firefox can process RSS feeds in xml format. If you use Firefox browser, when you try to subscribe to RSS, a page will open where you can select an online news feed service. Mozilla Firefox itself only supports RSS subscriptions in the form of news bookmarks.
If you are still using IE browser ( internet explorer) - there are again two options for the development of events - change the browser, or use an online aggregator, since IE itself does not support working with news feeds at all.
The Google Chrome browser also cannot work with RSS feeds, but such functionality can be added to it in the form of extensions. For example, this is what the Slick RSS extension for Chrome looks like.
Quite convenient, although the extension cannot independently intercept and process the feed URL. You need to add a link to the RSS feed to the collector and reader manually.
Services for subscribing to RSS feeds
Online services for subscribing to RSS feeds are absolutely free, and are somewhat similar to email services.
The most popular is Yandex.Lenta. In order to use the service you need to have a Yandex account. If you already use any Yandex services, then you just need to log in with your username and subscribe to the feed. After which you will be able to read the news feed through the Yandex mail interface.
Once upon a time there was Google service Reader, but it ceased to exist. This happened in 2013.
Well, that’s about all I have to tell you about this technology. Those who are particularly interested and curious can find more on the Internet. detailed information yourself, but in any case, it's worth trying first (our site's news feed via Feedburner). RSS allows me to always be aware of updates on interesting sites without spending extra time. I wish the same for you.
Formats for presenting data. Explanation of this abbreviation for different versions looked different:
- R ich S ite S ummary (RSS 0.9x) - enriched summary of the site;
- R DF S ite S ummary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) - a summary of the site using the resource description infrastructure;
- R eally S imple S yndication (RSS 2.x) - very simple collection of information.
The general meaning of all these options is that RSS is a way of publishing (broadcasting) and distributing information from a site. Web content syndication means the rapid dissemination of information through simultaneous posting to multiple sources.
RSS feeds are mainly used for annotations, announcing the latest information on websites: news, new publications, updates and changes.
History of the creation of the RSS format
RSS technology was first used in the late 90s by Netscape to distribute news on its Netcenter portal. First open official version RSS became version 0.90. By 2000, the format received wide use and split into two different standards - RSS 1.0, based on the W3C's XML and RDF standards, and RSS 0.92, based on Netscape's version 0.91 of the format. Latest version RSS 2.0 format is a further development of this thread (by the way, the author of this version, Dave Weiner, came up with his own decoding of the abbreviation - Really Simple Syndication).
In 2006, a competing format, Atom, promoted by Google, entered the fight against RSS.
Terminology
You can find on the Internet various designations for a news stream in RSS format: RSS feed, RSS feed, RSS stream, RSS channel. All these terms mean the same thing.
What are the benefits of RSS feeds for website visitors?
There are special aggregator programs that allow you to collect information from many RSS feeds from different sources. These programs are capable of not only automatically receiving data in RSS format, but also processing it: sorting, filtering and making it as easy to read as possible. All popular browsers are equipped with such aggregators (“readers”). There are also aggregators on the Web - these are special sites for collecting and displaying RSS feeds (examples - Yandex.Lenta, Google Reader).
Using aggregator programs, users have the opportunity to subscribe to news from their favorite sites and blogs and view them without bypassing the source sites themselves. This allows you to save enormous time, especially if the reader has a lot of such favorite resources. By opening an RSS aggregator, you will almost instantly find out which sites have been updated since your last session with it and have the opportunity to quickly scan the headlines in order to decide which ones are worth visiting the source site to read full version news, articles or other fresh material.
Viewing news in RSS format also allows you to save traffic, since this format is much “lighter” than the pages of regular sites due to the absence of a graphical shell, advertising, etc.
How to subscribe to a site's RSS feed
Modern browsers are able to independently detect the presence of RSS feeds on sites, and, having detected them when visiting the site, immediately offer the user a dialog to subscribe to the RSS feed. In addition, sites that broadcast RSS feeds usually have special icons - most often an orange rectangle with diverging waves inside. A standard RSS icon looks something like this: or this, but the design of such an icon can vary as much as you like, depending on the imagination and eccentricity of the webmaster. By clicking on this icon, you subscribe to the site's RSS feed.
Why does a website need an RSS feed?
Based on the above, I hope you have already understood that a modern website, especially one that is updated frequently, cannot do without its own RSS feed. If you are interested in increasing traffic to your website and retaining the attention of regular visitors (customers), you should not neglect such a useful tool.
The RSS feed also brings certain benefits in terms of site promotion, since replicating this feed on other resources helps to increase the number of links to the source site of the RSS feed.
In addition, there is an opinion that sites containing RSS feeds can be ranked higher due to the fact that RSS feeds contain a) highly targeted, b) narrowly themed, c) frequently updated material. The presence of an RSS feed contributes to more frequent visits to the site by search robots, that is, such a site is indexed more often and new information is discovered by search engines earlier. In addition, this factor increases the chances of being included in the search engine index.
RSS feeds and SEO
SEO specialists warn about the negative consequences that having an RSS feed on a website (blog) can have.
Firstly, it was noticed that search engines often index the content of RSS feeds on other sites earlier than on the source broadcasting the feed. And these sites are considered the primary sources, and the author’s site also receives a hit from search engines for “duplicate content.” This is especially true for blogs in which not only the title and short annotations are included in the feed, but entire posts. Thus, your content quickly becomes "non-unique" and "useless to people" from the search engines' point of view. Why does this happen, you ask, since the feed contains links to the news source? But because the sites that rob your content (RSS directories, social bookmarks) are mostly “fatter” than your site, that is, the trustworthiness of your resource is in no way comparable to the trustworthiness of a promoted service.
As a consequence of the described phenomenon, broadcast streams often shift the original source down in .
Secondly, do not delude yourself that those who rob your feed will necessarily include a link to the source: many blatantly cut out such links or put them in noindex, nofollow or in JavaScript.
Thirdly, in the same way, you should not expect that visitors will come to you from thieving sites via links: many of them will limit themselves to reading the news where they found it. And if we take into account the frequently encountered point number 2 (lack of a direct link to you), then the prospect of increasing traffic through such resources becomes completely illusory.
Fourthly, XML format very convenient for . Having created your own RSS feed, you will quickly discover that its contents are shamelessly “torn” by the creators of satellites, spllogs and other web vermin, further contributing to your content being considered non-unique and useless by search engines.
The takeaway, however, is not to abandon RSS entirely. Your regular visitors need an RSS feed! But there’s no point in rushing to add your feed immediately after creation to various RSS directories.
How to create your own RSS feed. RSS Feed Elements
A number of engines and CMS already have built-in RSS feed publishing modules. If you use one, you don't need to worry about this issue. This chapter is for those who want to write their RSS feed by hand or are interested in the RSS format specification.
To create your own RSS feed, you first need to create a document in the XML 1.0 standard. That is, the RSS feed file must begin with the line
Another key point is the actual rss element indicating the version:
The tag is placed inside the rss tag
http://www.link to site
The required channel elements are title, link and description. In element This is a standard type of RSS feed. After this, you need to install an RSS icon on the site. You can scroll down to the footer of the site and see what it looks like, although I'm sure you've seen it hundreds of times already. To organize the ability to subscribe to your RSS feed, you need to do 2 things: 2. Insert between tags This step is necessary in order to inform browsers about the presence of an RSS feed - as you remember, self-respecting browsers have their own RSS readers. You can enter additional information about the channel, source site or channel author. language Example:
ru-ru Example:
(Copyright 2017, Ivan Petrov) managingEditor Example:
webMaster pubDate lastBuildDate cloud Example:
(In this example, to request a notification, you would send an XML-RPC message to ccc.com, port 80, path /RPC2. The procedure called is myCloud.rssPleaseNotify.) ttl image The maximum width is 144 (default is 88). Element author comments enclosure
Link to full text of news or article No. 1
Link to full text of news or article No. 2
http://www.link to site
Link to full text of news or article No. 1
Link to full text of news or article No. 2
ORGANIZATION OF SUBSCRIPTION TO RSS FEED
OPTIONAL RSS FEED ELEMENTS
The language in which the channel is written. Allows collectors, for example, to combine all sites in one language on one page. The list of valid values for this element is .
Email address of the person responsible for the editorial text.
The email address of the person responsible for the technical aspects of the channel.
([email protected](Vasily Petrov)
Date the text was published in the feed Date and time in RSS follow the RFC 822 specification, except that the year can be represented by two or four digits (the latter is preferred).
The time the channel content was last modified.
Specifies a web service that supports the rssCloud interface that implements a subscription to channel updates. .
Lifetime - the number of minutes for which a channel can be cached before updating from a resource.
Example:
(
An image (in GIF, JPEG, or PNG format) that can be displayed with the channel.
The maximum height is 400 (default is 31).
Email address of the author of the message. This is relevant, for example, for RSS feeds of online media, in which each article has its own author. Element Format:
The URL of the page for comments related to the post. Element Format:
Describes the media object attached to the message. It has 3 required attributes: url (application address), length (application size in bytes) and type (application MIME type). Example.