RSS Unpacked

Have you seen the little orange  button on your web site? Were you curious enough to click on it and get some techy looking page but with strangely familiar words in it? This isn't an error, it's an RSS feed — a technique for sharing information from your Insight site.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, although that fact doesn’t tell you much. An RSS file (or RSS feed) is a text file that usually contains details about the most recent entries on a web site. It doesn’t have any information about colours, fonts, layout, or any other graphical issues. It’s simply text in a standardised format. If you look at an RSS file for this site you can see in places some text that isn’t just gibberish, but is information about this site or about its recent entries. The file says “Here’s some information that describes a web site and here are the titles and brief descriptions of recent entries.”

But what is an RSS file for? In general it is so that other people, websites and computer programs can do stuff with the information; the standardised format of RSS files makes this easy, regardless of which web site the file has come from.

There are two main uses for an RSS file : syndication and news readers.

Syndication

Syndication is the process of one web site taking content from another. Having an RSS file provides a means of publishing a "contents list" on the source site. The syndicating site can then read this programatically to find out what's available, by checking the RSS file every few hours, the contents list is kept completely up to date. This is exactly what the News Reader module does — you can specify several RSS feeds (source files) that are fetched periodically by the News Reader for display on your site's page.

News Readers

The second use for an RSS file is so people can read entries, or parts of entries, in an RSS news reader. These are programs you run on your computer. You tell it the addresses of RSS files you are interested in and it downloads them. The program then displays the entry headlines, and maybe their content, regularly fetching the latest version of the RSS file.

People use RSS news readers if they like to read lots of weblogs or news sites because it makes the process much quicker — the person no longer has to visit each site in turn to see what is new, the latest entries are fetched automatically, and the lack of graphics makes the process much quicker. It’s more like skipping through email messages rather than viewing websites, in fact the latest email programs now include news readers as standard.

RSS on Insight

Insight uses RSS in two ways — two different directions if you like — displaying information from an RSS source (the News Reader module) and listing information in an RSS format (the orange XML button  ).

In other words, you can incorporate news headlines within a web page, and you can also make the content of your web site available to others by advertising your own RSS feed. This means site visitors can use your RSS feed to be alerted to new articles on your site.

Switching on your RSS feeds 

The orange  button is a conventional way of advertising your RSS feed to visitors. Those who know what it is will know what to do with it, those who don't will ignore it, and some people in between will do the research to find out what to do. The RSS feed actually has the same information as displayed by the article list module, and it is in this module that you can turn on the orange button:

In the Settings of the Article List module, tick the Display Link to XML button to turn on the button that links to the RSS feed.

Note that when logged out only publicly available articles will be listed in the RSS feed, when logged in you'll get a personalised content feed that displays the content you have permission to see.