Ever since I found out that many people don't know what RSS is, I've been trying to introduce it to people because it's so useful and will be as important as email in the future. If you don't know about RSS, the Internet will be much less efficient and less enjoyable.
I couldn't find a concise and easy-to-understand introduction article on the Internet, so I had to resolve to write it myself. Although I am not a professional in this area, but I believe that you just need to read this article patiently, you will understand the basic RSS and its use.
Before I explain what RSS is, let me start with an analogy.
When I was in college, I had a habit of going to the poster board at the back of the cafeteria every day. There, all sorts of latest news would be posted, such as which department was having a lecture, what movie was playing on Tuesday night, second-hand transfers, and so on. If you look at the posters, you will know what is going on in the school.
If you don't have a poster board, it would be difficult to find out about them. Lecture news is posted on each department's own bulletin board, movie schedules are posted in the cinema, and second-hand goods news is posted in the hallways of each dormitory. With over 20 departments and 10,000 people at my university, it would be quite a hassle to keep track of all this news, if it were possible at all.
From this example, let's consider the Internet.
What is the Internet? The most intuitive way to put it is a cluttered and huge source of information, the richness and clutter of which is not only enormous, but almost infinite.
Is there a way for a user to keep up to date with the latest information that appears on the Internet?
The answer is that there is no way, he only has one website to open one website to see what is the latest content, just like every day he must go to each department to walk through the latest lectures. If there were several websites, it would not be difficult to go to each one, and it would not take much time to read them all. But as the number of sites you follow increases, this task can quickly become "Mission Impossible". Imagine, if you focus on dozens, or even hundreds of websites every day, what would be the scene. Imagine how much time it would take just to open their home pages, not to mention the time spent browsing.
Some people may say, if you are an ordinary person, who would care about so many websites?
I would say that even if you are just a beginner or the simplest user of the web, the number of sites you have a relationship with is increasing dramatically because of the advent of Blogs. More and more people are writing weblogs (Blogs) to showcase their thoughts and lives online, which will inevitably include your friends, or other people you are interested in. If you want to know what he/she is up to, you are bound to keep an eye on his/her Blog, so your website browsing list will one day be as much, if not more, than your phonebook or MSN Message buddy list.
At that time, you will find that browsing the web will become a difficult and inefficient activity.
Is there a way to find a "poster board" on the Internet, a single place to go to find out all the latest content you want to know?
Yes, that's RSS.
To be precise, RSS is like a poster of a website, which includes the latest content of this website, which is updated automatically. So, if we subscribe to RSS, we won't miss the updates of our favorite websites.
But the poster alone is not enough, there must be a poster board, that is, there must be an RSS reader to do. Because RSS is just a data source, it is itself written for programs to read, and must be converted by a reader in order to become a format that can be viewed.
RSS reader is various, roughly divided into two kinds, one is the desktop type, need to install; the other is in the line type, directly using the browser to read.
To subscribe to RSS in your browser, you must first know the RSS address. Generally, the home page of each website will be prominently marked with it. The name may be a little different, such as RSS, XML, FEED, we know they all refer to the same thing on. Sometimes RSS will be followed by a version number, such as 2.0, 1.0, or even 0.92, this does not matter, they are just different internal format, the content is the same.
After copying the RSS address down, you can add it in your online reader.
From now on, just open this one page and you can see the latest content from all your favorite sites.