How RSS Works

Chris Poulette. I'm an editor here at how stuff Works dot com and sitting next to me as usual to join the discussion as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Good eye, Yeah, okay, what's that all about? Well, today I thought we would take our discussion from a topic that was sent in from a listener, So let me quickly read this suggestion. Hi guys, my name is Nick. I am from Australia and I love the podcast. I got it. Yeah, I was searching the web recently when I stumbled over something

which has been annoying me for a while. Now. What is an RSS feed and how do they work? Thanks? Well, Nick, I figure that's what we're gonna tackle is, um, RSS feeds. Yeah, and uh, and chances are you are listening to this podcast thanks in no small part to at least some sort of variation of the RSS feed. That's true. That's true. And wait a minute, you know you mean of all the articles on the site that I've written, which is what four or five? Now you picked one that I

actually wrote. Yeah, yeah, out of all the thousands and thousands of articles on how Stuff Works, I decided to go with one that Pallette himself uh penned or typed. I guess you didn't really pen it. But um, yeah, if you go to how Stuff Works and you search for RSS, you'll see that our own Chris Pallette wrote the article on it, so I figure he's an expert. It's a trap. Anyway, Let's let's go ahead and kind of give you a sort of a quick introduction to

r SS. Uh. It all goes back to nine. Wow, I remember it well when we're teaching the world to laugh, remember, well, Yeah, it was a very good year. So, um, RSS stands for a couple of things, depending on who you ask, the the most common uh form of our or the most common what would you say, like, the most common name for RSS is really simple syndication. Um, that's that's how most people just translate the RSS. But that's not

necessarily the only way to break out that acronym. That's true. Um, Actually, it had had a different name assigned to it by the person who basically put it together. His name is Dave Winer, and if you're a tech nut then you probably recognize his name. He's had a lot to do with the blogging over the years. And um, he actually had a hand in creating rs S, the RSS technology. Um,

and it had another name. But it's funny because I think everybody thought that RSS was supposed to stand for really simple syndication, because it really is simple to syndicate using these feeds. Yeah, you might have heard of it also as r DF site summary or rich Site summary. Yeah. Yeah, and uh, those names not exactly the coolest names. Yeah, it's and yeah, it gets a little more difficult to explain what r S S is when you think of

it that way. When you think really simple syndication, you already have kind of an idea of what RSS is supposed to do. It's supposed to syndicate information across the web.

And what does that mean. Well, it means that instead of you having to go to multiple destinations on the web to look up information, you know, information that changes over time, you would have the this subscription service where you would subscribe to a feed of information and that would serve it to you in some form, like whether it's a website, like a portal web site like eye, Google, or a desktop RSS reader anything like that, so you

can get information from multiple sources packaged in a single view that way. That's true. Um, And uh, just as a quick thing about the name, apparently Mr Weiner thought it was a really cool name too, because he adopted it in the last specification that he released for rs s, which is RSS two point oh. Um. But uh, it's it's funny because the really simple part is very very apt because there's really not a whole lot to it.

RSS feeds are essentially a different form of web page rather than being an HTML, which is hypertext markup language UM, which is basically how a web page tells your browser to format it with the different fonts, the different size fonts, bold italic, underline, you know, all those little things pictures that kind of Yeah, exactly where to put the photos whether or not to invent a chunk of flash. I mean,

that's essentially what an h TAMIL page does. And if you were to go up to your browser and view the source of the document, you would see that basically, all the text in the document itself, unless it's part of a picture, is you know, just surrounded by a couple of tags. So it's it's you know, it may not necessarily be programming, but it is, you know, one

of the closest things. It's sort of that in between phase where you're actually doing stuff to text to make it work differently in a computer, but you're not actually programming a lot of it. UM the thing is uh RSS and it's cousin ADAM basically use a cousin of the UH The HTML specification called XML, which stands for Extensible Markup Language UM and the thing. The difference in the two is essentially, I mean, they are very closely related,

but XML lets you create your own tags. Like for example, if you had bold or B for bold um in HTML and you wanted to make it do something completely different, well, you're kind of stuck because the HTML specification is very limited. XML, on the other hand, as long as you tell it

what each thing means. You could say, you can have something with lots of names and addresses in it, and you can create an address tag and based on the difference is you have to tell it what the address tag means, you say, oh, well always bold anything in the address tag. Okay, well, now I know what that means. I can display it that way. Right. So XML is just a really flexible form of HTML. Yeah, it's it's really um, it's it's difficult to explain in a way

that uh, that's you know, very succinct. But but the other thing you can think of as XML allows you to define, uh, the contents of a text file in different ways. Now, when when you're using a web browser to search for information your computer, like let's say you're searching, you're actually using a search engine like Google. Um, Google

doesn't necessarily know what it is you're searching for. It's looking for certain keywords um in my depending on the algorithm, look at the history of search as you've done, so that it can get an idea of oh, when this person types in UM, the letters in I C E. Uh, this person is actually looking for nice France, not nice, right, like but otherwise otherwise the computer doesn't know that. The

computer can't tell it, it can't understand context. Um. XML is one of those ways where you can you can create meta data, which is this this sort of attempt to kind of teach computers context, but it's all still human defined. Essentially, metadata is data about data, right, So it's all the characteristics of the information that you're putting

in that text file. So if you create a reader that can read certain kinds of tags that you've defined in x mL, so so both the content wherever you're putting it up and the reader itself use these same definitions. That's what allows you to access that particular kind of information.

So with RSS, that's what we're talking about. They both that both the reader and the information that you've tagged have this particular kind of x m L in it um if the nice thing is there are a lot of different UH web services out there that automate RSS if you want to use it, Like there are a lot of blogging systems that use some form of r SS automatically so that someone can subscribe to your blog and every time you update it when that person logs

in there there RSS reader will look for the most recent information from your your blog. Now, Um, putting it in like the RSS information into a website that doesn't have it automated is a little more complicated. Well, it's a little bit more complicated, but basically an EXCEL document essentially has to have something somewhere else that the computer can look to to find out what all these little funny tags mean. I mean that the brow the web browser is going to know that stuff in between the

greater than a less stand sign. Um, Basically that's a tag. But if if they're not HTML tags, it's gonna say, well, I don't know what this is unless you tell me where to go to get the information about this. So um, that's that's the point of RSS or ADAM is that these are definitions. Um. Otherwise the page that your RSS feed is based on is just an XML document with no that doesn't explain how to interpret that information and

there's no context. So yeah, I mean it's it's it's a little simpler than it would be if you were putting in another XML because otherwise you'd have to define all those elements yourself. You could do it if you really want to, but then you have to tell every time you create a web page with the essentially the RSS information, and you'd have to say, well, you have you know, when you open this page, look for this

document on this server and it will be there. You really need to have a good familiarity with HTML and probably I would say JavaScript too before you really tackled it. And UM, I'm sorry, no, no, ahead, I was just gonna say that. Um. So, the nice thing is that RSS and and ADAM are accepted specifications, so you know, they're very common if you use Blogger or WordPress or

you know a lot of other different tools. Basically, when you create a blog, it'll probably it'll ask you if you want in RSS feed, and if you do, it will go ahead and create that document along with all the other documents in your blog, so you really don't have to mess with it. And then you just you know, people who come to visit your blog, Um, see, if you were visiting the tech Stuff blog could click on the RSS logo and subscribe to it if you were the user. And the same thing is true for things

like podcasts. Like we said, um, you can find our podcast, for example, on iTunes, which has its own sort of uh way of checking up for the latest information to make sure that you have the latest editions of whatever podcasts you've subscribed to. But there are other uh, podcast hosting sites out there that you can you can go to and just subscribe via RSS and not have to go through iTunes if you don't want to. That's true. It's it's just a it's basically just an XML file saying, UM,

you know, this will be updated every so often. Please check back. This is where the files will be found and um every time you're Uh. This is the neat part because the specification is so widespread. If you're using Maya, Who or Eye, Google or you know news Gator, or you know, even the software browsers, Um, you know the a lot of the web browsers now have they built in. Some of the mail programs haven't built in now. I mean you, RSS is so ubiquitous now that you can

read RSS feeds and just about anything. You just have to know the U r L of the r s S document, the XL document for the RSS feed, tell it where to look, and uh, basically you're off and running. Yeah, And there's there are a lot of portal sites out there that, um that make this even easier. Like I mentioned I Google before, if you have a Google account, then you pretty much can you know, just go ahead

and start creating or eye Google page. If you don't have a Google account, well they're free, so you can go ahead and make one. You know, they're gonna rule us all at one day anyway, so you might as well go ahead and get on the train now. Um, but I Google you you can create a little windows that hold essentially RSS newsreaders for or or well RSS feed readers I guess you could say, for pretty much anything you can think of, and that has a very easy search tool you can use to search for specific

UM feeds if you want, uh. And you can even organize it by category, so you could have an entire page just dedicated to entertainment. You could have one dedicated to technology. I am currently explaining my own eye Google page. Well you can, um, I mean that That's the thing is the readers like that and and net vibes and page flakes. Basically they break each individual read into its own box and so you might see five or six,

five or ten uh current news stories in there. UM Google Reader is a different version where you can incorporate all your feeds into one big long list and it can go on forever and ever and ever. Or you can organize them into folders and read just the ones in the folder, or read feed by feed right, which for me would be overwhelming. Uh, it's a lot. It can be a lot. If you have, you know, and you started to a lot of feeds, it's gonna fill up. I mean, even if you're checking multiple times a day.

You got to remember, all of these web pages are updating pretty frequently. Actually, that's that's the reason why RSS is really so valuable today. Now, back when I started using the web, and I'm sure it's the same for Poulette here. Um, websites didn't change that often because it was a pain in the butt to change a web page. Um. So web page is really served as sort of a static, you know, information page, if you will. It was something that was meant to give you some information, but it

wasn't necessarily going to update very often. So um, and then there's this big thing called push that was supposed to change ja all that, and it kind of didn't. But then basically what it was gonna do was start web pages, We're gonna start pushing information out to your computer, um, and you hear it every once in a while. It sort of resurrects every once in a while and people say, oh, well, this is really going to be pushed, and everyone goes, yeah, yeah.

But RSS is kind of like push even though it's it's pull. Your computer is pulling information for all these feeds. But uh, the websites are updating regularly. So if your computer says, you know, go to ce NN dot com and check the RSS feed, Oh, there's four new stories. Let's pull them down, and it pulls down just a little bit of the story, usually as much as the

RS And this is the part of the XML. It says, you know, pull down this much of the headline and half a paragraph of copy, and just that that way you are. You have the incentive to click on a link to go to the the actual page that has that information on it, because you could imagine if you allowed an entire page of text to come through a reader,

there'd be no reason to visit that that host page. Well, you know, if you don't visit that host page, then the hosts right exactly, the host is not going to get any eyes on any of the advertisements that they use in order to fund the web page. And it is, after all, how they're making money off of you coming

to their website. Right, So, if you were using an RSS reader to read everything, and you didn't ever have to visit anyone ever again, then pretty soon those sites wouldn't have any revenue streams coming in, and then you wouldn't have anyone to read anyway, because they'd all be gone. Yeah. Yeah, well that's uh, that's one of the advantages of forking over a few dollars for an RSS reader or finding a free one. Um, do you ever use any software RSS? I just have. I just use Eye Google. It's just

my that's my go to I use. I use a combination of I, Google and Twitter to stay up to date on everything. All right, Well, I've I've used lots and lots and lots of different readers, most of them for the Macintosh. But uh, NewsGator actually used to be a different sort of company, but they sort of specialized now into RSS feeds and acquired two of the very very best and made them free. Actually both of them

are shareware and and NewsGator has made them free. One of them is feed Demon that's for Windows and you can actually sink to your your account, your NewsGator account with both of these. So if you have a Windows computer on your desktop at work and then use a Mac at home, you might use net Newswire for the Mac, which is an awesome feed readers, my favorite of all

of them. Uh, and there are lots of really neat ones UM and it will sink up the changes so that you don't have to worry about going I've read that, I've read that. Man, I've read all these. Well, you know what's going on. This is pointless. You don't have to worry about that with those with that sink and um you know they're they're tons and tons of others. UM news Owl is one that's free and uh, you know, you can even get Thunderbird Mozilla Thunderbird to read your

RSS feeds and that's good on Mac Windows Analytics. And we should point out that not everyone is super happy with r s s UM. I can think of one organization in particular that's been getting although although the ire of this particular organization has been directed not at r S S in particular, more towards just the web in general. That'd be the Associated Press a P so ap. The Their beef is that, UM, you know a lot of people are citing AP reports for their UH in their

own news articles. So you're seeing this pop up in on news sites and especially on blogs. And the problem is that if you're using this information, um and and there's no real incentive for the reader to go back to the original report, AP feels like it's doing all the legwork and getting none of the eyeballs. So UH, there's there's this big issue now, um AP says, I think it's something like, gosh, I can't remember more than maybe five sentences or something is UH is too much,

you can't quote more than that. UM, I'm probably have that wrong. If I do, go ahead and write me, write me a nice little letter. UM. But because I didn't write this down for my notes, I just happened to have heard it off off hand. But their their point is that they don't want people using their content to get eyes when they could be getting those eyes. So now, one of the interesting things is both AP and the Wall Street Journal have had these kind of

issues recently. UM and they they sort of are in some ways indirectly attacking UH search engines like Google, because I'm sure if any of you have done a Google search, and I don't know that anyone out there listening to this has never done one. If you haven't, here's what you can expect. You search for something on Google, you're gonna get linked names, and then you'll get a small

excerpt from the website underneath the link explaining it. So in the case of an ap are nicle or perhaps even a Wall Street Journal article, you might get the the headline of the article, plus some of the body of the text. Um. Some people say that that's too much. And you know that even that is too much, like you're giving away too much. People are just reading the summary and there's no need for them to go to

the website to read more. Um. I think it would be a monumentally bad decision two demand that information be removed, because can you imagine how much traffic would plummet if Google said, you know what, fine, We're removing all of your links from our search results. No longer will we ever link to any ap content whatsoever, will only link to other websites that have that that relate to whatever search result that is. Can you imagine how traffic would dip? Well?

And it might, but well, look at look at this. Though the AP makes their money, it makes it's money. Sorry, I am an editor. The AP makes its money from newspapers that subscribe to its services. And if we are all running around, if if one newspaper, I mean you know, there are tons and tons of newspapers that are are going, um bankrupt, and some of them are going out of business,

some of them are going web only. Um, if it ends up where say the Sacramento B is the last one standing and everybody's ripping off the AP headlines, then um, you know they nobody's everybody will stop going to the Sacramento B. Their advertisers are going to bolt and they're gonna go under two, and so will the AP. So they're they're defending their you know. My argument there then is why let that why let the AP articles remain

publicly available? Why not password protect them or subscribe or protect them, because if you're if they're freely available on the web through some website, then you know pretty much

everyone's gonna grab it anyway. Yeah, that's that's true, and I think is probably why you see UH articles on some websites where you can only read part of the first paragraph and UH In fact, I saw an article just the other day in which Wall Street Times owner Rupert Murdoch is saying that all newspapers should make their

websites for pay only. I'm sort of paraphrasing and oversimplifying, but yeah, I mean he's saying that if you want to stay afloat, you're gonna have to find ways to make money, and this is a great way to do it. I think the horse is already out of the barn. Unfortunately. Well we'll see. I guess they've gotta they're they're gonna try to protect themselves, that's for sure. At any rate, Nick, I hope we answered your question about RSS feeds and

how so. I guess that just brings us around two. Well, you know what, it brings us around too, right, But WoT I thought we were already doing. No, I've got man listener mail. Now I have a bigger headache. So this listener mail comes from Okay, I'm guessing that's the correct pronunciation. Should you can write me a saw and tell me that I get it wrong. Guys, you forgot to mention the April Fools joke that came out a

year or two ago. The YouTube video on Legend of Zelda the movie coming out on April one, two thousand nine. This one had a lot of Zelda fanboys drooling myself included, um yeah, there were tons and tons of April Fools jokes that we couldn't get to and people exactly and people send us many many responses and saying, hey, you forgot this one. We didn't necessarily forget them, We just didn't have enough time to go into it or else that would have been an hour long podcast. But that

one is a pretty good uh joke there. I've also seen I mean, now, granted, I'm a big fan of fan made trailers and uh, you know trailers that were made by by people who, um, we're doing it a sort of a film project that where there's no real movie, the trailer is the film. And there are a couple

of really good ones out there. For example, Grayson is probably one of my favorites, which of course is about the the man who once was Robin of Batman and Robin fame and he has to solve a murder mystery and m and it includes pretty much every d C character you can think of. In a little flash at some point in that preview and not the flash, but the but the preview is the previous, very very impressive, and at the end of it you're like, oh, when is that coming out? And then you realize, oh wait,

that was the movie. Um, and then of course you really did see it all then. I also like gob Stopper, which was a funny or die video clip is just a joke, but it was a horror movie version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring Christopher Lloyd as the demented Willy Wonka. Uh. It is awesome. UM, So if you haven't seen it, check it out. Don't check it out at work. Um. That's all I have to say about that, all right, So thanks very much for

that listener mail. If any of you want to write in, you can write us tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. We have blogs up. You can find that at how stuff works dot com. Look over in the right hand side you'll see the blogs listed. And keep your eyes peeled because on Fridays I'm going to start wrapping up our podcast discussions in a blog post, so that if you have anything you want to contribute to the discussion, you can write into the comments there and

I'll be responding as well. Who knows, we might even get Pullette to respond once in a while, um, if he feels up to it, because you know, Fridays are tough days for editors here. Yes, that's no joke. They've got a lot of work to do on Fridays. But we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you