Monitoring a large number of sites while waiting for new interesting information to appear is not so easy, and often impossible. So back in 1995, developer Guha and others developed a custom meta-content Framework.
The name is not very memorable - but it was not a full-fledged feed, because it was the full-format RSS feed that appeared only in 1997 and began to be used on the Netcenter resource, and the name itself means Rich Site Summary - a brief summary of the site.
Subscribe to RSS feeds
How is it convenient to subscribe to RSS to your favorite resource? You can at any time, without visiting a certain news site, receive brief information about the material that has appeared in a special reader. How do I subscribe to RSS feeds?
Now it is quite simple to do this - all you need to do is download a convenient RSS reader, configure it and search on the site to see if it has an RSS icon on it. If this is present - right-click on it and select "Copy link URL ..." - this way, you will receive the address of the RSS feed and can paste it into your reader window.
There are two types of RSS readers for the computer:
Let's take the QuiteRSS program as an example - this is a convenient software package for connecting to an RSS feed and reading all the necessary information from it. But before loading the necessary data into it, you need to find out the address of the RSS feed. How to do it?
Go to the desired site, for example, Pravda.ru, scroll to the very bottom of the page ( it may be different on other sites) and find there the RSS label with the corresponding icon. Click on the link - a new window will open in which you will be given links to categorized RSS feeds:
Hover over the link with the desired RSS feed, right-click and select Copy link address- after that, the address of the desired RSS feed will be in your clipboard, and you can paste it into the reader.
Now you can return to QuiteRSS - open the program window:
and click on the button with the plus sign, which means "Add":
The link that you copied is saved in the clipboard, so QuiteRSS takes it from there and automatically pastes it into the feed URL field or the website address, but if this does not happen, paste the cursor in the required field and press the Ctrl + V key combination or click in the text right-click the field and select Paste. Click Next:
The program will check if there is really an RSS feed at the specified address, and, if successful, a new window will open in which you can put the RSS feed in a separate folder (if desired) and give it a name, changing the one that is installed by default ... Click Finish:
Ready! You are subscribed to the RSS feed of the Pravda.Ru site and can read news without leaving QuiteRSS and receive them constantly without opening a browser or the desired site.
WordPress and RSS feed
The popular system for creating WordPress sites is very common throughout the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet. Therefore, many users who create a site on this basis want to install an RSS feed on it for the convenience of tracking news from their resource. How to do it?
WordPress was designed from the ground up to run blogs and information resources, so RSS was one of the first features to appear on this platform. Therefore, immediately after creating your resource, the RSS feed of your site has already been made and is located at your_site.ru / feed ( less often - your_site.ru / feed = rss2).
If you could not find a standard RSS feed on your own site built on WordPress, then you should go to the site http://feedburner.google.com/, enter your site in the field there and click the Next button - the site will automatically detect existing RSS feeds on your site and will give you direct links to feeds:
Source code and appearance of a standard WordPress RSS feed
But often nobody likes the standard WordPress feed and everyone wants to customize and modernize it (which the standard WP interface cannot help).
You can use editing the RSS feed according to your own requirements (but for this you need to download the RSS feed settings to your computer, study the CSS design and HTML formatting), or you can easily tweak the feed format using a plugin.
There are dozens of extensions that can help you significantly diversify the RSS feed from your site, but Ozh` Better Feed does the best. How do I install this plugin?
Go to the plugin's official website and click the Download version X.X button - an archive with the extension will be downloaded to your computer. Then there are several options for installing the plugin - you can unpack the archive into a separate folder and, connecting to your site via FTP, transfer the folder with the unpacked archive to the wp-content / plugins folder, and then activate the plugin in the WordPress console:
However, you can do it easier - go to the console point by point Plugins - Add New:
Good day, dear readers. This article may not be relevant, but I thought it might be useful for some readers. We will talk about what RSS is and how to use it.
I would not like to go into technical details, I will try to be brief. RSS is a special format from the family of XML formats, with the help of which we can receive news from almost any site without going to the site itself. For example, you like a site (blog), it is updated quite often, and every day some news that you are interested in is published on it.
To find out if something new has appeared on your favorite resource, you have to go to it and watch updates. Agree that this is not very convenient.
Here RSS also serves to inform us about these news. There is no need to constantly visit your favorite site, refresh pages, when you can simply receive a notification that the content of this site has been updated. Convenient, isn't it.
You may come across different terms on the web, for example rss feed, rss feed, rss feed or just feed, in fact, they are all the same. This is the name of sites that have an RSS format.
But on Blogspot Blogger blogs, we come across a name like Atom. It also belongs to the XML family of formats, but also includes an HTTP-based protocol. As you can see, it is this abbreviation http that is always present in site addresses, since they are all transmitted using this protocol. The Atom format was invented later than the RSS format, and serves the same purpose.
The RSS format has its own icon, I'm sure you see it a lot, especially on blogs. This icon has a bright orange color, most likely to be eye-catching, so users can immediately see that this site has an RSS feed to subscribe to. Of course, on the web you can find various interpretations of this icon, in different colors and in different shapes, but for all icons, this particular sign is a distinctive feature.
We can see the news feed in two different ways. First, the usual XML format. Looks like that.
But more often, you can see the tape like this.
This means that the feed has been passed through the FeedBurner service. You can read about its benefits and uses in a series of articles. Feed streamed through FeedBurner has a wider selection of different feed readers and services.
Also, an e-mail subscription becomes available. All these settings are made by the site owner to make the RSS feed more compatible with various applications, to get statistics on subscribers and much more.
How to use RSS
For our convenience, there is a huge choice for receiving news from your favorite sites. Anything that helps us get updates is called an RSS aggregator. Almost all browsers have built-in RSS aggregators. Also, the aggregator is called a reader, RSS reader, online client. Let's take a look at some of them.
You can receive website news directly in your browser. All modern browsers recognize sites that have an RSS feed. Typically, when you visit any site, if that site has an RSS feed, an orange RSS icon is displayed in the browser address bar or menu. If the site does not have an updated news channel, then such an icon is either absent altogether, or has a gray color.
Look carefully, perhaps you have never even paid attention to it or you just didn’t think about it. Let's see how this button is used to subscribe. I decided to carry out experiments with the Habrahabr website, because it is updated very often and you can quickly see the results of your subscription. So, you are at your favorite site.
In Internet Explorer, the subscription icon is located in the menu
We get to the channel page, in the upper left corner there will be a subscription link.
You can view updates by opening Favorites in the sidebar of the browser, tab Channels... Sites that have updates will be marked as unread.
In Mozilla Firefox, the icon appears in the address bar
On the page of the feed, from the drop-down list, select News feed bookmarks
How updates come, I personally did not understand. For several hours nothing has been updated :). Who knows, share in the comments, please. Maybe I did something wrong.
In Opera, I like the subscription best, although I hardly use it. The icon is displayed in the address bar, by clicking on it you get to the page where all the articles are already conveniently structured.
After subscribing, each time you open the browser, if there are updates in the feeds to which you are subscribed, an update message will appear in the lower right corner
In my opinion, the most convenient subscription, the ability to receive news quickly, conveniently, and without constantly going to the site itself.
Now we have considered the options that the browsers themselves give us. But at the same time, not all browsers have been said yet. In principle, I was not going to talk about all of them, but Google's Chome wanted to pay attention. The thing is, I didn't quite figure it out. So far, I found out that to make a subscription, you need to install a special extension.
To do this, click on the icon Key - Tools - Extensions, a page with extensions will open, select RSS Subscription Extension (from Google)... After installing this extension, the RSS icon will appear to the right of the address bar. But with the subscription itself, it turns out that you cannot receive news in the way, for example, offered in other browsers. And you need to choose a specific RSS aggregator. By the way, all other browsers (except Internet Explorer) also give the right to choose the program through which you will receive site news. And now we will look at the most common ones.
I won't be mistaken if I mention Google Reader and Yandex Tape among the most common. If your main mail is on one of these resources, then feel free to choose their applications for reading news feeds.
Google Reader has this icon 
Yandex feed such 
You can watch updates directly in their interface. Google always has a link to Reader in the upper left corner of the mail page. Yandex updates will be visible in the mail in the folder Subscriptions.
I would also like to say that Google offers to place subscription widgets on the iGoogle home page. I tried it, I didn’t really like it. news comes with a significant delay. It looks like this
It is not possible to list all online clients for reading feeds (RSS feeds). Let's take a closer look at this option. For example, you are using some kind of reader, and when you go to the RSS feed page, you cannot find your service among the options presented. The solution is simple, you can add a tape to any reader by simply copying it from the address bar of your browser. I will not give examples, but if you look carefully, there is always a link Add channel or something like that. It is even impossible to imagine simpler.
In addition to online clients for reading RSS feeds, there are also desktop programs. One of
the most interesting is the FeedReader program. The program is free, you can find out the details by clicking on the link.
Now, with this knowledge, you yourself will decide how it is most convenient for you to receive news from your favorite blogs and sites. I'm sure you can figure out other online clients for reading RSS feeds, and there are a lot of them.
Take part in the promotion.
Among my regular readers there was a girl Yulia, the author of a blog, the topic of which causes a lot of controversy and emotions (at least for me, for sure), a blog about vegetarianism Vegetarian on beans. I will never become a vegetarian, and I find this type of food unnatural for humans, and yet after reading several articles, I realized that you do not have to be a vegetarian to read this blog. A living language, a choice of topics for articles makes the blog very interesting for everyone, even for incorrigible meat lovers. I wanted to link to one article, but I couldn't even make a choice.
In this article, you will learn about Really Simple Syndication (PCC, PSS) technology. I'll tell you what it is in general, what an RSS feed and feeds are. How to organize an RSS feed so people can subscribe to your blog's RSS feed through an RSS reader.
What is this technology, RSS?
RSS is a group of XML formats that are used to summarize or complete news announcements, article feeds, new blog posts, and more.
The abbreviation RSS stands for different ways, depending on the version:
- RSS 0.9х - enriched site news summary from English. Rich Site Summary;
- RSS 0.9 and 1.0 - a summary of the feed of the site's posts using the meta-structure of the description of the websites from the English. RDF Site Summary;
- RSS 2.x is a really simple distribution from the English. Really Simple Syndication.
The direct purpose of RSS 2.0 is to broadcast, publish a short description for information and a link to the full version of the content on the web. However, often sites submit entire articles directly to the RSS feed for the convenience of users. Yes, from this they lose some share of traffic and income, but what you can't do for the sake of readers. Other sites act the other way around - they cut off the announcement of a new article on the most interesting, forcing the reader to follow the link to view this entire content.
I will not list modern browsers (you yourself know them) that can work with RSS feeds, because ALL browsers, without exception, can do it. They are able to download data from RSS and mail clients such as Thunderbird, Outlook.
The first swallow before the appearance of this format appeared in 1995. The framework prototype was called "Metacontent". And already in 1997, the technology that we now understand as PCC became famous thanks to Netscape. Netscape used it when filling his Netcenter portal. the Netscape Navigator browser at that time was one of the most popular - it was loud PR.
And after a couple of years - in 1999. - Major media use RSS 0.90 to broadcast content on their news sites: Disney, BBC, Forbes, CNET, Wired and CNN.
In the future, there was a separation of the groups of developers of the RSS technology and what we now know as RSS 2.0 - the most successful version based on version 0.91. Its main difference from another branch with a complex RDF description is the ease of learning for people and developers. The New York Times appreciated it and off we went. So much so that in 2006 a competitive format matured - Atom (used in Blogger, Blogspot.com).
All this (several XML-formats of this kind) significantly complicates the life of developers of services and software for reading RSS - after all, programs must understand several formats for presenting text, dates and metadata and work with all of them.
RSS-feed on the site: feed, stream, channel, newsletter
Feed, rss feed, rss feed, rss feed, rss feed, rss feed are synonyms and mean the same thing. One way or another, the presence of such terms in the design of the site means that the site provides an opportunity to subscribe to updates in RSS format.
Unfortunately, not everyone understands the benefits of having an RSS feed on a website. We will change that now. Guys, it's very convenient to use RSS-subscriptions! I understand that now there are Vkontakte news feeds, many sites maintain their own public pages and provide links to new materials.
Here's RSS - about the same thing, only done automatically, publishing news in order of release, built into many engines, and allows readers to use the readers of their choice (overview of popular RSS readers).
Many people don't use RSS because it seems complicated. You accidentally click the RSS XML feed icon on the site, a krakozyabra appears in the browser window, you run away in panic without understanding what it is and why. Do not do like this.
By subscribing to RSS, the reader will be aware of all the new content on your site (they will come to him in the mail or reader) - but only those that will be indicated in the settings for adding to the feed, i.e. some sections can be excluded from the mailing list.
What happens if you click on this icon? Nothing bad will happen:
At the top right you will see a list of RSS readers to subscribe, and at the bottom there will be the same news feed, sorted in descending order of newest. This is an XML-RSS feed that has already passed automatic processing through the XML processing service Feedburner. The advantage of a feedburner is that you can modify and improve the news feed, as well as monitor the number of RSS subscribers to the site.
At the same time, you can set advanced subscription methods when creating an RSS feed on the Feedburner service website - including subscription to RSS by email. Do not confuse a regular RSS feed with RSS-to-email, in a regular one you need to use programs and services, in an RSS-to-email - e-mail.
This is how the information about the possibility of subscribing by email looks like so that the news of the RSS-channel will be sent to the email:
And the convenience is no worse than Vkontakte subscriptions. By using RSS, you do not need to regularly check multiple sites for updates - you can read the latest content as soon as it is released. And all this is automatic - both for you and for the site owner. That is, users solve the problem of simultaneous access to new products from several sites, and site owners solve the problem of instantly notifying hundreds or thousands of users about the presence of new web content.
Apps, browsers, readers and aggregators for reading RSS
On the Internet, both SaaS and individual programs, there are special web and mobile applications - they aggregate information from RSS feeds so that you can read it. This is what they call RSS readers and RSS aggregators. They are available on smartphones, personal computers (desktops) and tablets - you can choose to your liking.
Service sites like Liferea, Snarfer, NewsAlloy, Reeder, FeedBucket, QuiteRSS, The Old Reader, AOL Reader, RSSOwl, NetVibes, FeedDemon, Kanban, Digg Reader, Feedly, Inoreader, My Yahoo, Tiny Tiny RSS, Omea Reader, NewzCrawler, NewsBlur are aggregators or readers - they allow the user to collect RSS information from multiple sources.
The largest online readers-aggregators such as Yandex.Subscriptions (Yandex.Lenta) or Google Reader have been closed for a long time - it is funny and funny to read articles about RSS readers in 2016 containing “Go to Yandex.Subscriptions”, “Using RSS is easy - first open Google Reader ".
Representatives of Yandex and Google motivated the closure with “too expensive service,” but in fact, the reason is rather that RSS readers do not bring media coverage and income to search engines.
It turned out to be more important for Yandex that users read sites that have passed moderation in Yandex.News, rather than being able to form their own preferences. Fortunately, many applications and services have appeared to cover this problem.
For example, the same phones and browsers on a PC may well load the titles of RSS feeds for their users. I did it back in ancient Firefox and on Nokia's Symbian, when Google Chrome and iPhones were gone! What can we say about 2016. Technology has gone ahead and life has become better - there is much more choice. Not to mention the fact that all modern browsers are able to load RSS.
It is not even necessary to install special software or register with services, there are browser plugins that solve this problem. For Chrome, such a plugin is called an RSS feed reader - it pulls news headlines directly into the browser, which is very convenient.
There are such plugins for other browsers as well.
In Internet Explorer, the PCC subscription icon is located in the menu. By clicking on it you will be taken to the RSS channel page and you can subscribe by clicking on the subscribe button in the upper left corner. Updates will go to the "Channels" tab, which can be found in "Favorites" (located in the sidebar). Sites with unread updates will be flagged.
In Mozilla Firefox, the icon is located in the address bar, where you can subscribe to RSS feed updates, which will come directly to the browser. Opera (before the transition to the Chromium / Blink engine) used to have a similar system, very convenient for users - with structuring for users and the appearance of an update message in the lower right corner.
Previously, 4–6% of Internet users used RSS, now the percentage has decreased for two reasons - first, the number of Internet users has grown dramatically; secondly, not everyone likes this format of interaction, but the format of social networks and instant messengers is in its spirit.
It's very strange, because subscribing to an RSS feed is no more complicated than subscribing to a Telegram feed - users just need to insert the address of the feed they are interested in into the reader or aggregator, and that's it, the subscription is completed. Receiving RSS by email is no more difficult: enter the address in the field, confirm your subscription, and receive news.
That's all, I wish you luck. Subscribe to the Seven Bloggers Blog RSS Feed -
The technology must be said to be very simple and effective. It doesn't take any effort to start using it. First of all, let's take a look at how this system works. This will allow you to understand and appreciate the benefits and value of news feeds.
How RSS works
This is an xml data format that allows you to keep track of website updates on the Internet.
A few years ago, any serious site provided the option to subscribe to its RSS feed. Now there is a tendency of "obsolescence", rss-feeds have ceased to be made on sites and the usual orange icon can be found less and less often. But RSS itself didn't get any worse from that.
I myself have not used this technology for a long time, because I thought that I did not need it. But having tried it once, I realized that I had lost a lot without starting to use it earlier. What have I lost? Time!
Surely you have favorite sites that you periodically visit, read articles and news, stay tuned.
Each site periodically publishes some kind of content - articles, news, comments. Subscription
RSS feed of the site's news allows you to find out about updates on this site as quickly as possible, without having to visit and view the site itself. It's like looking at the headlines in the morning newspaper. Why go to the site and look through it in search of news, if you can view the announcements of these articles on your computer, and if you find interesting material, follow the link to the latest article, the title of which will definitely be in the RSS feed. Not only does it save a lot of time, but it also reduces traffic, because you only go to the site if you are really interested in something.
RSS aggregator
News feeds are processed by special programs - RSS-aggregators. There are two types of aggregators - web services and programs on your computer. Which one to choose is a matter of taste. Online aggregators are somewhat similar in functionality to postal services - you create an account on the Web on one of the services, and all your feeds will be sent to the mailbox on your account. The good thing about this method is that you will always have access to your feeds, no matter where you are. But they have the disadvantage that you still need to go and check the box. That is, to find out about news or subscribe to a new feed, you open the page of the aggregator service in the browser.
Local RSS aggregators
Therefore, there are even more convenient ones - local RSS aggregators, which can be built into the browser, mailer, or be a separate application. If you know what an email program is, then you will understand the advantage of news feeds. A local aggregator allows you to follow the news much more efficiently - you get updates on the sites almost instantly. Local RSS aggregators themselves "run" to the site and if something new appears there they "bring" you the title or announcement of the article, and sometimes the whole article - it depends on what kind of feed the site provides.
I once used just such an aggregator built into the Opera browser - a very handy thing. However, at the moment this functionality has been removed from the Opera browser into a separate application - Opera Mail. And I no longer use the Opera browser itself.
How to subscribe to RSS
To subscribe to your favorite site's news feed, you need to find a link to the RSS feed on that site. Usually it is done in the form of a small pictogram that looks like this. This is the traditional term for RSS.
RSS and Internet browsers
At the moment, of the popular browsers, only Mozilla has implemented the ability to process rss feeds.
Firefox can handle rss feed in xml format. If you are using the Firefox browser, when you try to subscribe to RSS, you will be presented with a page where you can select an online feed service. Mozilla Firefox itself only supports RSS subscriptions in the form of news bookmarks.
If you still use the IE browser (internet explorer), there are again two options for the development of events - change the browser, or use the online aggregator, since IE itself does not support working with news feeds at all.
The Google Chrome browser also does not know how to work with RSS feeds, but this functionality can be added to it in the form of extensions. For example, this is what the Slick RSS Chrome extension looks like.
Quite convenient, although the extension cannot intercept and process the feed URL on its own. You need to manually add a link to the RSS feed to the collector and reader.
Services for subscribing to rss feeds
Online services for subscribing to RSS feeds are completely free, and are somewhat similar to postal ones.
The most popular is Yandex.Lenta. In order to use the service, you need to have a Yandex account. If you are already using any Yandex services, then you just need to log in with your username and subscribe to the feed. Then you can read the news feed through the Yandex-mail interface.
There was once a Google Reader service, but it has ceased to exist. This happened in 2013.
Well, that's about all I have to tell you about this technology. Those who are especially interested and curious can find more detailed information on the Web on their own, but in any case, it is worth trying it first (our site's news feed via Feedburner). RSS allows me to be always aware of updates on interesting sites without spending too much time. Which is what I wish for you.
Rss- a family of XML formats designed to describe news feeds, article announcements, changes in blogs, etc. Information from various sources presented in RSS format can be collected, processed and presented to the user in a convenient form by special aggregator programs
Wikipedia
On many sites you will see buttons or, which means that an RSS feed is available on that site. This service is convenient for site readers, because with the help of Rss aggregators, for example, Yandex.Lenta or Kanban.ru, you can collect your own news feed and read news from different sites in one place or receive them to your e-mail using the Rss2Email service. Read more about RSS, for example, in Computer.
This article will not focus on using RSS feeds and aggregators, but on how to quickly create a news feed on a website using RSS.PHP and MySql.
Initial conditions
So, you have a site that has PHP support and a MySql database (a very common combination, by the way). From the database, which stores the texts of your blog or news announcements, and we will receive data for our feed. The feed will be built dynamically, directly upon request, so only the corresponding script is needed. You can write it yourself, but you can take a ready-made one.
A bit of theory
First, a little theory. For our feed we will use the RSS 2.0 format, for those who are interested, I refer to the description of the format that you will find. And we will not use all the elements, but only those that we really cannot do without:
| Element | Description |
| title | Channel title. |
| link | Link to the main page of the site. |
| description | Channel description. |
| language | The language in which the channel is written. For example, ru - Russian |
| copyright | Copyright |
| managingEditor | Channel editor email. |
| webMaster | Webmaster email. |
| pubDate | Date of publication of information in the channel. |
| lastBuildDate | Time of the last channel change. |
| category | Specifies the category to which the channel belongs. |
| Item | The actual content of the channel. There must be at least one item. |
Item
| Element | Description |
| title | Heading |
| link | Link to full text |
| description | annotation |
| category | Category |
| pubDate | Date of publication of the article. Some aggregators will not display the article if the specified date has not yet arrived. But not all of them. |
Since RSS is a subset of XML, we should end up with something like the following: If you change something in the script, then check it for compliance with the standard on the Feed Validator or RSS Validator services
Launching the program
The program consists of the following files: rss.php- startup file, rss.inc- include file with class description, conn.inc- a file with a description of the database connection parameters.
To run the program, change the data on the connection to the database in the conn.inc file, change the feed parameters in the rss.php file and write it down to any convenient directory on your web server, even in the root one. Do not forget to check the data structure of the MySql database, for the program you can use for example the following:
CREATE TABLE BLOG (ID int (11) NOT NULL default "0", title varchar (50) default NULL, description text default NULL, link varchar (200) default NULL, date date default NULL, category varchar (100) NOT NULL default "", ab varchar (10) NOT NULL default "", PRIMARY KEY (ID)) TYPE = MyISAM;
after that you will have a tape with the address
What's next?
And now do not forget to put the button in a conspicuous place, and add the code between the tags to the pages of your site.
:so that browsers know you have a ribbon. And, of course, register the feed in a search engine, for example, http://blogs.yandex.ru/add.xml and in the http://blogs.yandex.ru/add-catalogue.xml catalog
You can download the program for creating RSS feeds for free, Rss.php (3 Kb)
