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Boomerang, Don't Ricochet your Web Site Visitors
You don't win your visitors' trust right away. It may take from 4-7 visits before they buy. You must always give them a reason to buy, and not offend them in any way because they will ricochet to other sites. Here's some things I do to get people to keep ...
Web Services Interoperability
Interoperability is one of the main promises of Web services. Web services are designed to be independent of the underlying operating system and programming language. In this article we will address some basic web services interoperability issues that are ...
Why web hosts and ISPs need web site monitoring
Why web hosts and ISPs need web site monitoringBy David LeonhardtIf you have spent much time earning a living on the Internet, few things will surprise you. However, I am always amazed with how many companies and individuals make astounding claims without ...
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RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a
way for a site to publish it's updates. RSS readers can
read these notifications and display a listing of the
updates to you, the user.
It's sort of like having a special 'inbox' for emails
announcing updates to your selected websites.
Many applications and websites support RSS feeds. You
can add RSS feeds to your My Yahoo! page, Firefox has
several RSS extensions such as Sage, there are sites
that deal w/ RSS feeds such as Feedsterand FastBuzz.
Thunderbird even allows you to set up RSS feeds similar
to your inbox.
There are also stand alone applications for RSS feeds
like Pluck, RSSReader and SharpReader.
Different readers allow you to subscribe to a feed
differently. Using Firefox w/ Sage, for example, you can
drag-and-drop the RSS icon into your RSS feed folder and
it's done.
What's the benefit?
You can use RSS feeds to see if there's anything new at
a given site before visiting the site. This wouldn't be
a big help if you only had one RSS feed. However, if you
have several sites you check routinely, this can cut the
time down tremendously.
It gives you more of an 'at-a-glance' view of all your
monitored sites. Imagine if when you went to click on
your bookmark for a site that it also said right then if
the site had changed and how. Also, depending on the RSS
reader you use, it can tell you when you have a new
update on the site.
Sites with RSS Feeds
There are many sites w/ RSS feeds. To know if a site has
an RSS feed, look for an "RSS" link on the site or a
button/icon w/ RSS, ATOM or XML on it. One cool use is
to set the RSS feed for a news search on a site. At
Yahoo! News you can search on a topic in the news and
then subscribe to that feed using the XML icon.
A lot of news/info/blog sites have RSS feeds that can
help you keep up to date on the info you want. The
Armchair Geek is just such a site. It's a collection of
tech info that's updated regularly. You can see if/when
it's been updated in your reader, see the title of the
updates and a short summary and then decide if you want
to load the site or that post or nothing.
Bottom Line
RSS readers allow you to see the latest updates to sites
(and possibly be notified) at-a-glance without having to
go to all your sites and load them. It's like peaking
into many sites from a single place. |
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