RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. Sometimes it has been said to stand for RDF Site Summary, but I'm not going to get nitpicky here.
RSS is a means to distribute information over the internet kind of like The Associated Press distributes news to many news organizations that can then redistribute it if they wish.
Feeding RSS from your website:
A website will compartmentalize its information into sections that could be articles, lists, or any other logical format you can come up with. With RSS these sections can be turned into what are called feeds or channels.
Reading RSS from your website:
There are two basic means of reading RSS feeds.
One is to use a news feed reader or aggregator. There are online aggregators and some that you install on your computer like a browser. This way you can subscribe to RSS feeds from several sites from one place and keep up with which articles you've read and which you haven't, when new content is available etc without visiting several websites one at a time. Google Reader is a popular free online RSS feed reader. If you would like to add this site to Google Reader sign up on their site (http://www.google.com/reader/), click on "Add Subscription" and paste http://www.escapekeygraphics.com/rss.xml into the field and click "Add". Most other RSS aggregators work similarly.
The second method of reading RSS from a website is by feeding it from your website. This a bit more technically complex and I'm not going to provide instructions for any method, but here is an example...I wanted to provide the same information that I have on this site to my sister site www.escapekey.net, so I used RSS to automatically feed my RSS channels from this site to that one. The content is automatically updated when I make changes to my RSS here. I could do this with RSS feeds from other sites as well and others could display my feeds helping both of us to distribute our messages.
Now for the heart of the matter, what you can do with RSS on your site.
I've already mentioned that using RSS encourages others to display your RSS feed and distribute your message, but there are many other uses when you consider the potential of using news readers that can be used from any computer anywhere. Articles, events or announcements are obvious (more ideas here) and by encouraging your clients to RSS they can avoid potentially annoying email newsletters while still keeping current. Keep employees at remote locations abreast of late breaking developments on projects while simultaneously recording progress. Announce specials and/or new products or services.
In a nutshell if you encourage your clients and employees to use an RSS feed reader you can keep them more informed by posting information to one place one time instead of disseminating the same information repeatedly in numerous formats.
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