Digital BW, The Print

On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 03:10:40PM -0000, pr_roark wrote:
> A gallery webmaster recently recommended "blog" software to a local
> group of artists.  One potentially useful feature that is usually in
> such software is "RSS" that allows one to notify those who are
> interested of updates or additions to the website.  I'm not sure how
> that works, but it did sound interesting.

In practice RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is used to aggregate updates
from a bunch of different websites into a "feed reader", so a user
doesn't need to manually go to news sites and then a dozen blogs every
day checking for updates. Instead the reader program polls the "RSS
feed", which formats the articles according to a standard, and then
collects them all and presents them at once.

It's very convenient for your audience, but it can reduce the traffic to
your blog, since they get the content on their computer instead of by
visiting your site in a browser. So often bloggers will put only a
summary or snippet into the RSS articles, and you have to click through
to view it. Strobist's article on that:

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2007/08/starting-today-full-rss-feeds.html

-- 
  | Mike Acar |                                | mike at waspfactory dot org |