Everything You Need to Know About RSS

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One of the most frequent questions people new to the world of blogging ask is “What is RSS?” Big orange buttons, saying “Subscribe” are found on nearly every blog, but unless you know what RSS is, you won’t know what the orange button is for. And a lot of times new bloggers don’t know exactly how to make RSS work for their blogs.

What is RSS? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. In a nutshell, RSS is a way for people to read regularly updated content (like blogs) without having to visit the actual website every time.

How does RSS benefit blog readers? If you’re a big fan of blogs, like I am, keeping up with all of your favorite sites can be difficult. RSS makes it a little bit easier. First, you need a feedreader, which is basically an aggregator for the RSS feeds that you read. For beginners, I recommend Google Reader, which is free and also easy to use, especially if you are already used to the gmail format.

Follow the directions to add feeds to your reader. Then whenever you have a moment to read your blogs, you can just log in to your reader, and all of the latest posts will be there waiting for you. But watch out! Blog feeds can get addicting! I currently follow 117 blogs in my reader!

How does RSS benefit bloggers? The biggest benefit to bloggers is making it easier for your readers to read your posts. As with anything in life, making your blog easily accessible will attract more readers. I highly suggest running your feed through Feedburner (also a free service), because Feedburner lets you see how many people are subscribed to your blog, and it also offers ways to make your feed even better.

The partial feed vs. full feed debate. There is a lot of disagreement amongst bloggers as to whether offering a full feed is better, or whether offering a partial feed is better. Some of the arguments I’ve heard in favor of partial feeds is that it encourages people to click through to visit your actual site and comment, and that it’s harder for other sites to steal your content if you offer only a partial feed.

However, I strongly favor offering full feeds. The main reason people subscribe to feeds is to streamline their blog reading. It defeats the purpose of a feed if the person still needs to visit the actual blog to finish reading. I find that when I’m reading feeds, if I have something to say, I will click through to comment, even if the entire content is available in my feedreader.

If you want to offer full feeds and still encourage commenting, Feedburner offers a tool called Feed Flare that will let you place a link to your comments at the bottom of your feed. I’ve been using Feed Flare for a while now, and I’ve found that it works pretty well.

As far as stealing content goes, I don’t think there’s any really good way to prevent it. I put a copyright notice at the bottom of all of my feeds, but sometimes it’s still taken. And I’m not willing to take full feeds away from my readers, just to fight content theft.

One final note to bloggers. I recommend subscribing to your own feed. It’s a good way to make sure your feed is updating when you post and making sure your feed looks good in a feedreader.

Do you use a feedreader? And which do you prefer? Full or partial feeds? If you have suggestions that I haven’t mentioned or if you have any questions, feel free to share in the comments!

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