Understanding RSS feeds

 RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is the industry standard for publishing and subscribing to the internet content. RSS is competing standard is Atom. This technology has changed the way for internet users today. The real need for RSS is that the internet is full of information, users surf the internet, read their favorite articles, news, watch videos etc. Say for example while surfing the internet you find something interesting and you want to be in touch with the content you are viewing. One way is to bookmark the website URL and visit it again to see what has been changed and what's the new content. The other way is to subscribe to RSS feeds provided by the websites. These days many websites provide RSS feeds that users can subscribe to.This is indicated by standard RSS icon shown left side of this post. There are many subscribing methods. Users can select the method they want. For example users can subscribe via Email or if they have their own websites, they can simply display the RSS feeds on their websites. The new content from your favorite websites start appearing as a fresh content on your website! This sounds really interesting and beneficial because if your website starts getting fresh content, it becomes search engine friendly. Search engines always like fresh contents on your websites.

RSS Feed Readers

Your favorite internet content can be brought straight to your desktop or a cell phones. In certain webpages, you will see small button that says either RSS or XML, clicking this button, you will see all the xml content. To read this xml content and display in a better format, there are programs called Feed readers. 
These feed readers read the feed content which is in a standard XML format and display the content in better readable format. The examples of RSS readers are Google Reader, NewzCrawler, Feeddemon etc.There are special computer programs called Feed Aggregators that aggregate information from multiple internet sources. There are mobile applications developed for some of the feed readers, using which users can get the web content that they have subscribed to on the move.

Feed Advantages

RSS has advantages for both subscribers and publishers. Subscribers always get the information of their interest and they can read at their convenient time. Great way to narrow down to the information that interests you. As far publishers are concerned, they will have many subscribers based on their website content. Published content will have links back to the publishing website, so the publishers get hits to their sites back and have good amount of traffic. Subscribing to RSS feeds helps you to narrow down to only the content of your interest. This becomes important because the information over the web very huge.

Implementing RSS Feeds

To implement RSS feeds on your websites is really simple. If you are not a computer programming geek, don't be discouraged, you can still create RSS feeds without having any computer programming knowledge. This must sure be encouraging fact. Many blogging tools such as Blogger, wordpress, vox etc have ability of syndicating your blog without having you write code for it. It all requires to follow the instructions provided by these blogger services. There is a web feed management tool called FeedBurner which is very handy and useful while dealing with RSS feeds on your sites. FeedBurner gives custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters etc.

Disadvantages of RSS Feeds

For any new technology we need to see what the technology is lagging or its disadvantages. When I tried understanding what could be the disadvantages of using RSS feeds in our websites, there less or no disadvantages. I hardly find any. Different people have different opinions on this. Some say that RSS feeds will not display images and the identify of publishing website is confusing, publishers can not determine how many subscribers have subscribed etc. There are ways to overcome all these. I say that we need to use powerful feed management tools like Feedburner where you have several options such as you can track your subscribers, analyze the statistics, change feed settings, enable/disable the feed etc. And as for as publishers identity is concerned, it depends on the posts, the published posts should have links to the publishing sites. In fact this will bring more traffic to publishing website.

To configure FeeBurner for your blogger, refer the steps mentioned here