Thinking Outside the Inbox

What is RSS?

RSS (abbreviation for Really Simple Syndication) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works ... in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") ... Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically.

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)]

One can find RSS feeds on any number of popular news sites like BBC.co.uk, CNN.com, MSNBC.com and Yahoo.com. Clicking an 'RSS' link allows one to subscribe (freely) to a news feed or stream via web browser, email program, news feed reader and/or website like Facebook.

RSS technology has been around since 1997. It comes standard in many open-source content management systems (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, et al.) There are, fortunately, tools available online that can create RSS feeds for almost any web page -- in minutes.

Inside and Out

Like email newsletters, RSS feeds can be sent to email programs like Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird. However, RSS feeds can also be streamed directly into web browsers as bookmarked links (favorites) without installing additional software.

It is also worth noting that there are several, online RSS readers that offer highly useful, subscription management tools that allow you to easily add and remove news feeds without having to opt in/out; as is the case with most mailing list systems.

More importantly, RSS feeds are dynamic. Emails are not. This means that changes to information presented by an RSS feed are nearly instantaneous. Whereas, changes to an emailed newsletter would require resending a revised copy for every revision made.

Adapting to RSS

The results of a recent, study with regard to the availability of RSS feeds for eight local, Southwest Florida business networking groups are shown below. The group pages that were analyzed:

• Business Owners of Southwest Florida


• BNN Times & Business Builders Network


• Chamber of Commerce of Cape Coral Members


• New Free Leads (NFL)


• J Brooks & Associates, Inc.


• Serving Southwest Florida


• Show Me The Networking


• WIRE Networking
  

In the study, a web page was chosen from each of the groups' websites. The web page was then processed with the Ponyfish RSS Feed Builder Tool.

The resulting, generated RSS feeds were then analyzed for properly functioning links and relevant link descriptions (titles).

Page Sample	Native RSS?	Titles OK?	Links OK?	Page Rank
bluechipbizsolutions.net/ display-fstar.asp?featured=go	no	n/a	n/a	n/a
bnntimes.com/pages/Articles	no	no	yes	1
capecoralflcoc.weblinkconnect.com/ CWT/External/WCPages/WCDirectory/ Directory.aspx?CategoryID=420 &Title=COMPUTER &AdKeyword=COMPUTER	yes/no	yes	no	4
fortmyersnfl.com	yes	yes	yes	2
jbrooksai.com/services.html	no	yes	yes	1
servingsouthwestflorida.net/work	yes	yes	yes	n/a
showmethenetworking.com	no	no	yes	1
wireswfl.com/directory.html	no	n/a	n/a	n/a

• 'Native RSS' indicates whether or not an RSS source was found within the listed website.


• A title refers to the descriptive text that is clicked in order to follow a link.


• Links should point to a page that corresponds to its title.


• 'Page Rank' is a numerical rating system that Google uses to classify web pages. Ten (10) is the highest rank. Higher ranking pages are more likely to appear before lower ranking pages in search results. This value is subject to change.

• 
  

  BluechipBizSolutions.net and WIRESWFL.com could not be processed by Ponyfish. The sites were, however, fully operational at test time.

  
  


• 
  

  The links in the RSS feeds for BNNTimes.com and ShowMeTheNetworking.com were correct, but the titles were not.

  
  


• 
  

  CapeCoralChamber.com has an RSS feed for its event calendar, but not its business directory.

  
  


• 
  

  FortMyersNFL.com and ServingSouthwestFlorida.net both have RSS feeds available on their main pages. Ponyfish RSS Feed Builder was able to correctly identify this feature.

  
  


• 
  

  For a site without native RSS, the JBrooksAI.com sample produced the best RSS feed in terms of accurate titles and links. Most, if not all of its web pages are static and written in HTML.