>Can anyone explain RSS feed to me in terms I'll understand?It is simply a text summary of content from a website, designed to allow other sites or other programs to get that information. A podcast, for instance, is nothing more than an RSS feed. It contains the details of the sound file like where it is located (location to download it), the time of the podcast, the owner, the summary of the podcast, the title of the podcast, etc.
>What does it do?
"RSS Aggregators" or "Podcast Aggregators" can read this file from a different location and pass on the information to another site.
BaseballBlogs.org is a baseball blog "aggregator" or gatherer that will allow someone to submit their blog's RSS Feed... and it will automatically check for blog updates periodically and post it up on its own site.
Basically, it is way for people to see a lot of information in one fell swoop (for those, for instance, who read a ton of blogs regularly, and who need to pick and choose content).
Firefox has a special extension that I use for baseballgeeks.com, where it will actually tell me when a headline is updated on the main page. It is constantly rereading the RSS feeds of my favorite blogs and alerting me when there is a new entry and the title of that entry.
>How do I use it?
Your blog here uses a very barebones RSS feed that I programmed RRBBS to create every time you update your blog.
The RSS feed for any blog here is:
http://www.rrbbs.com/rss/YOURUSERNUMBER.rss
My feed: http://www.rrbbs.com/rss/1.rss
Your feed: http://www.rrbbs.com/rss/249.rss
This is the URL that you would submit to an aggregator or to a site that can use it. I believe Yahoo has a service that allows you to enter RSS feeds that you like, and it condenses all the headlines into a single page for easy viewing.
I have never used this, so I don't really know how it works... but that is the general idea.
Hope this helps.
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"Treat the Earth not as if it was given to you by your parents, but as if it was lent to you by your children." - Kenyan Proverb
"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw
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