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| February 2009 |
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Welcome to this month's issue of Techno Update. Techno Update is a monthly newsletter delivered to your inbox to discuss the latest in software, technology and 'stuff' to make your life easier. As you may or may not be aware, Lincoln and I have just moved the family to Melbourne (over 850 km away from where we have lived for 11 years) and are very excited to be starting a new adventure in this fabulous city. A big change like this wasn't an easy decision to make but we decided that the time was right for us and our children to move and so far we are loving it. Moving has also made me question and put under the microscope my business. Why did I start my business? What are my goals? In undergoing such reflection I realised that I love what I do because it requires of me continual and lifelong learning in such vast and different areas of my life. This month I've asked a client of ours to share his article about RSS feeds as I've had a few emails coming through requesting this information. Next month we'll be talking about podcasting and adding audio to your website. So grab a cup of coffee, sit down and read this month's cheat sheet on What the heck is RSS anyway? Remember if you have a technology question, send me an email.
Kylie Short
What the heck is RSS anyway?by Alastair McDermott
These RSS feeds are an essential technology in understanding blogging. What sometimes gets confusing is that they go by several different names - web feeds RSS, feeds, XML, and several other names. The industry has decided on web feeds as the unofficial name. You may have noticed this icon http://images.google.ie/images?q=rss%20icon on many blogs - it's the RSS feed icon! Traditionally these icons are usually orange, but often site owners change the colour to be more compatible with their website look and feel. You can "subscribe" to a feed by clicking on this icon. This allows you to automatically receive updates of new blog posts as soon as they are published. You can receive them directly to your inbox by email, or read them in your feed reader software. Ok, so what about feed readers? Feed Readers are tools that allow you to read and manage your feed subscriptions all in one place. Of course you know how we geeks like to give everything different names, so they're also sometimes referred to as "feed aggregators", "RSS readers" and "news aggregators". There are different types of feed readers - some that run on your desktop, some that are completely web-based and Google even have a mobile version of theirs which runs great on web enabled mobiles. Here's a selection of some of the most popular ones: * Bloglines Need some more help? Here's a great video that helps explain the power of RSS some more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU About the author: Alastair McDermott is the owner of WebsiteDoctor.com, an online marketing training and consultancy company . He has been developing websites since 1996 and blogging since 2003. Alastair blogs about online marketing and search engine optimisation here.
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RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is a document that contains either a summary of content from a web site or the full text of a website. RSS feeds allow you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from sites you are interested in. This saves you time by not needing to visit each site individually. It reduces the need to manually go and check a web site to see if it has been updated.