April 2006
Your website can have an ‘up-to-the-minute’ look and feel using RSS feeds. This easy-to-use technology lets you provide your site visitors with the latest news and weather, quickly and simply. You don’t have to manage the updates, just feed it onto your site from a credible source.
Publishing information from sources you see as credible, and relevant to your organisation and clientele, can be an important part of your website strategy. Up-to-the-minute information that is complementary to your business encourages people to return to your site time and again.
What is RSS?
RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. It lets websites distribute headlines, news stories, weather and other content. You can either receive RSS feeds, or send them, depending on your needs.
If you use RSS feeds to get content, the technology checks for updates from any number of sources employing RSS to feed the information onto your site. If new information exists, the technology publishes it in the appropriate section of your site, such as ‘Latest updates’, or ‘What’s hot’. (Ref: XML.com, ‘What is RSS?’)
If you publish RSS feeds from multiple sources, you become what is known as an RSS ‘aggregator’. Google News is one of the major RSS aggregators, publishing items from some 4500 news sources continually.
The Tamworth City Council portal site*, for example, uses RSS feeds to provide news stories from the Northern Daily Leader on its homepage. This provides residents, businesses and people interested in the district, such as tourists, an up-to-date resource of information about the district.
*Tamworth City Council uses Telstra Web Manager (TWM) functionality to publish the RSS feeds. TWM is an online website building tool created by icemedia working with Telstra Country Wide.
RSS can increase traffic to your site
If you make your information available for other sites to publish using RSS technology, you become a parent site and can potentially increase traffic to your own site.
For example, an online newspaper makes its ‘breaking news’ items available for other websites to publish. When people visit the other sites and click on a news headline, they link straight to the online newspaper’s site, a move that potentially captures new customers.
A number of well-known news, entertainment and information sites use RSS technology to feed information to other sites, including Wired News, which has syndicated its news headlines and summaries, and BBC News Interactive, which now has feeds for the majority of its sections.
Applying the technology
Simply put, RSS is a type of XML*. It employs HTML-like tags to define the information available to be used as an RSS feed. Once the information is tagged appropriately, it can be used by a number of sites. Any updates made to the parent site will also be made on any of the sites using the feeds, a key element of XML. (Ref: WebReference.com, ‘Introduction to RSS’)
*XML stands for ‘Extensible Markup Language’, and allows web developers to create customised tags. For a full definition, visit the Webopedia site.
icemedia has in-depth RSS experience. Contact the icemedia Sales Team for more information on RSS.
Useful links
For articles on RSS technology, visit: