ArmageddonMUD
RSS Introduction
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RSS, or "Really Simple Syndication", is a protocol for sending and receiving information. As simple as it is, using it can be confusing for people who haven't tried it before, so we have put together this simple walkthrough to show you a few of RSS's uses. But first, a quick glossary of terms:

  • RSS -- A common syndication protocol on the Internet
  • Atom -- A syndication protocol similar to RSS
  • Syndication -- The act of publishing information
  • Aggregator -- Something that collects information, often called a reader in the RSS world
  • XML -- eXtendable Markup Language, a common information format that looks a lot like HTML
  • Feed -- A source of information. For example, an RSS Feed is a listing of information in XML form
  • URI -- Uniform Resource Identifier. Also called a URL

There are two things you need to get started. First, you need the URI of the RSS feed. For the Armageddon General Discussion Board, the URI of the feed is 

http://www.zalanthas.org/phpBB2/rss.php
The other thing you need is an RSS reader. There are a lot out there, but for now we're going to use one provided by Google. Go to reader.google.com to take a look. You'll see that there is a link to "enter the feed URL" from that page. Go ahead and do that, entering the URI from above. If you follow the instructions and all works out as we'd expect, you should see something like this:

Now you see the feed through Google's RSS reader. This convenient format gives you an easy way to browse the latest information that the RSS feed describes.

So, this reader is pretty nifty and all, but what other readers are there, and what can they do? Another handy example is the RSS features in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Sometimes the URI for an RSS feed is embedded in a webpage. If so, Firefox will have a little orange icon in the lower-right of the window (in newer versions it is next to the URI of the current page) as seen below:

If you click that icon, you will see a menu giving you the option of creating what Firefox calls a "Live Bookmark." This is actually a way of showing information from the RSS Feed as though each piece of information was a bookmark in your browser.

Most aggregators will let you see a variety of news sources in one place. Take the Google customized homepage for example:

Each item on the above page comes from an RSS feed. If you use Google's customized home site, you can add the Armageddon General Discussion Board to your home page by clicking "Add Content" then entering the feed URI.

This just about wraps up our quick tutorial. If you're interested, here are some related links:

Created by Raesanos on 12/10/2005.