Syndication, RSS and all that

One of the essences of a blog or even a paper journal is that it is made up of a list of entries. As you add posts to your blog, you extend the list of post you have made, and when people read your blog, they are looking through the list.

In this post I’m going to dig into the list-ness of blogs and talk about how RSS is used to communicate about lists of things including blog posts.

Each individual blog post has a bunch of common elements. An author, a date/time that the entry was published, the content of the post itself (your wise words), categories, and lots of other stuff. If you are a WordPress user, when you write or edit a post, all this metadata is available on the right hand side next to where you write your words. We call this extra stuff metadata. Literally data about data.

So what?

Well, it turns out that because all your blogs posts have similar stuff in them, you can make a list of them, and all posts have these similar bits. And all of everybody’s blog posts have similar stuff in them too. We can make a list of your blogs posts, or a list of a whole bunch of blog posts together.

So, all this list-ness became apparent and people started getting excited about doing things with these lists, like:
* can I get a list of all the blogs I like together so I can read them at once?
* can I put blog headlines on my webpage?
* can I search through lots of blogs for something I’m interested in?

Okay, so to do this we need a standard way of making a list of blog posts. And that’s what RSS is. RSS (full name Really Simple Syndication) is a standard way of making a list of blogs posts (or almost anything really) and communicating it easily.

That’s the standard RSS icon above. You’ll see that where a blog is offering an RSS feed (most do). It might show up in the page itself, or in the address bar of your browser. Clicking on it will offer to subscribe you to the feed. Subscription here means that you are going to get your browser or another RSS reader application to go and get the blog details and be able to display them to you when you like.

Say you have twenty blogs you like to read. But getting to twenty websites is a pain. It takes too long. Well, if you put those blogs into an RSS reader, and it goes and fetches blog headlines and posts for you, and displays them together. Bingo, I can whip through twenty blogs easily. Or a hundred. It makes it easier to take part on the global conversation if you can read through lots of blogs easily.

So, that’s the background to this stuff. Next I’ll take on finding and using a feed reader.