RSS Feeds for Multiple Sites

First off, what are RSS feeds. RSS is the logical successor to what in the late 1990's was called "push technology." It's basically a sign-up service, where a website update is sent to the client's feed reader.  This is not an email service, though there are email clients and webmail which can double up as RSS readers. 

Nowadays, RSS is defined as "really simple syndication."  And it really is simple.  It's so simple that most bloggers can activate this on their blog without any problem at all. It's just an option switch, turning Atom/XML on.

The good news is that RSS sends a message to RSS aggregators informing them that the website has been updated. And the aggregators broadcast this to other aggregators.  And if you are signed up to receive the feed, you're informed of the update.  Why is this a good thing? For the blogger or website owner or webmaster, he doesn't have to maintain a subscription list, and have the email sent to the subscribers.  Maintenance wise, that is so neat.

And as I mentioned earlier, even a newbie can have RSS turned on.  And with that, the world knows when a blog is updated.  This is an advantage because even without knowing it, the blog is being listed for search engines. There's no need for the search engine spider to go to the site and crawl all over the directories.

On my part, the last point is the one I really like.  Significantly, this can be extended further by submitting the RSS feed or channel to more RSS aggregators. This is part of my job. It makes the blog more easily seen by search engines, and has a positive impact on page rank.

The fun part is that I do also this on my own and for free with some other blogs I like reading. It's my way of sharing these blogs with the rest of the world. (Of course, this works only for publicly readable posts. Private posts stay private.)

--Andoy
16 Feb. 2010