Educational Technology Resources and Tips

Why Use RSS Feeds

WHY USE RSS FEEDS?

Many people are interested in Web sites such as news sites, community and religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, and weblogs whose content changes on an unpredictable schedule. Repeatedly checking each Web site to see if there is any new content can be very tedious. Before RSS Feeds were available, users would have to go to each page, load it, remember how it is formatted, and find where they last left off in the list.

Email notification of changes was an early solution to this problem. Unfortunately, when you receive email notifications from multiple websites they are usually disorganized and can get overwhelming, and are often mistaken for spam.

RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email. The feed your aggregator checks is virus free and you know that everything in your aggregator is something you want to read because you subscribed to it. There are no ads, no spam; just new content from the sources you read. You can scan the headlines, read the entire post, click through to the actual Web site, and file the information away for later retrieval.

Another feature of RSS is that it contains strictly content from web sites; it removes the eye candy that encompasses many Web sites today. You will not see Web site templates downloaded within an RSS feed, only the content that the web site is providing. A nice feature of some aggregator is the ability to create your own template and pull the Web site content from your feeds into it. This is often called web content customizability. You can see how this is literally changing the face of the World Wide Web.