Making life easy with RSS
23/10/2006 by paul
For ages now I've known about RSS but, whilst I understood the concept, it has only been very recently that I've implemented this myself and, as ever, I'm now wondering 'what was I waiting for?'.There are arguments about the official meaning of the RSS acronym, but one of the more commonly accepted versions is 'Really Simple Syndication'. This is a means of distributing regularly updated content (individually known as 'items') such as news, via the Internet, without the need to manually visit the individual page or website. The items are provided in standard XML format prescribed by the official RSS specification, of which 0.91, 0.92 and 2.0 (which I use) are arguably the most common.
To read the news, all you need is a RSS reader, which can be obtained for free from a number of sources, including Google, and a very basic reader is built into Internet Explorer 7 (this is currently in beta, but pretty good in my opinion). Your news reader will periodically check our site (and any others to which you subscribe) for updates, and when new news is available, display it for you to read. The reader will automatically hide news that you've marked as read, but the real advantage of using a news reader, as found on Google Personalised Homepage for example, is that it allows you to view all your news subscriptions on the one page without having to visit any other websites.
Your might also want, or prefer, to continue to offer your news updates by email, and this same problem occured to me when setting up our feed. Fortunately, thanks to a very timely article in the UK magazine Practical Web Design, I discovered that the guys at FeedBurner offer a managed RSS distribution service, and this includes an option to receive updates by email. You still have to have an RSS feed accessible on your website for FeedBurner to report, but they offer many features that would otherwise take some time to acquire yourself. You then point anyone interested in subscribing to your feed to their URL, in our case http://feeds.feedburner.com/BoxedeCommercialSolutions. This frees up more time for you to concentrate on doing whatever it is that you do, rather than creating newsletters.
Okay, so that's what it is, but what about the applications for RSS? Of course, it's most often used to publish news updates, but what else can we use it for? Though I haven't done it yet, I'm considering using this to post price updates to resellers of some of our site's products. The same system could also be used to update customers with back-orders that are waiting for particular products, rather than having to email everyone; or for customers that are interested in any price movements or special offers available on a particular product. The applications are really only limited by the uptake of news/RSS readers by the general public.
If you're working on a project within a team, you could use RSS to communicate project related news to the members of the team. There are possible security implications for the commercial use of this technology (RSS was never designed to be secured) but, so long as you take reasonable measures to hide the link, you can be reasonably assured that it won't become public knowledge (common sense applies here as to what should and shouldn't be posted to such feeds).
The beauty of this technology, particularly when coupled with FeedBurner, is in its ease. Previously, some of our sites had news items which people were required to actually visit! Now, the same items are automatically deposited in our RSS feed (as well as appearing on the news page), and FeedBurner notifies anyone subscribed by email. Interested parties will receive this information in their preferred format, at their convenience. In our first commercial test of this service, in which we announced pricing and the availability of a new Pentax camera, that camera became the #1 seller almost instantly.
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