Syndicating your site content with RSS or Atom

Date: Thu Nov 01 2007
Making your web site known to the world is important. If you don't promote your existance to the world, how will anybody know about your site? If you don't get visitors you might as well not have created the site.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is one of the new methods of web site promotion. It is the structured data format used originally to syndicate blogs and news, but is now spreading quickly to use by millions of web sites already. Its use is growing rapidly.

When your site uses RSS, it publishes a small file containing the RSS feed for your site. The file is in a format easily readable by computers, but not so easily readable by humans. With the RSS feed, other software around the web can easily retrieve RSS files and know what new articles have been published. For example people can use RSS feed aggregator software to quickly scan large numbers of RSS feeds, or they might go to the new types of search engines that specialize in indexing the material published through RSS feeds.