RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

Users of RSS content use programs called feed ‘readers’ or ‘aggregators’: the user ’subscribes’ to a feed by supplying to their reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user’s subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

The initials “RSS” are variously used to refer to the following standards:

Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)
Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0)
RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0)

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a lightweight XML format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content. Think of it as a distributable “What’s New” for your site. RSS is a method of distributing links to content in your web site that you’d like others to use. In other words, it’s a mechanism to “syndicate” your content.

To understand syndication, consider the “real world” situation where artist Scott Adams draws a daily Dilbert cartoon. The cartoon is made available to any newspaper that cares to run it, in exchange for a fee — and 2,000 papers in 65 countries do so.

Unlike Scott Adams, syndication of web content via RSS is unlikely to make you rich. However, it can be an easy way to draw attention to your material, bringing you some traffic and perhaps a little net fame, depending on how good your information is.

What Is RSS?

How does RSS syndication work? Say you publish a new web page about a particular topic. You want others interested in that topic to know about it. By listing the page as an “item” in your RSS file, you can have the page appear in front of those who read information using RSS readers or “news aggregators” (explained more in my sidebar article, RSS: Your Gateway To News & Blog Content). RSS also allows people to easily add links to your content within their own web pages. Bloggers are a huge core audience that especially does this.

What does RSS stand for? There’s a can of worms. RSS as introduced by Netscape in 1999 then later abandoned in 2001 stood for “Rich Site Summary.” Another version of RSS pioneered by UserLand Software stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” In yet another version, RSS stands for “RDF Site Summary.”

History buffs might be interested that there’s been some rivalry over who invented RSS. This is why we have both different names and indeed different “flavors” or versions of RSS. Mark Pilgrim’s written an excellent article, What Is RSS, that charts the different versions with recommendations on which to use. I’ll also revisit the version choice you’ll need to make. But first, let’s look more closely at some basics of what goes into any RSS file.

What is pinging?

A ‘Ping’ is a basic Internet program that lets you verify that a particular Internet address exists and can accept requests. The verb ping means the act of using the ping utility or command.

Pinging in the blog world means different, but still similar. There are certain services that scan blog regularly for updates and publish the recently updated blogs (for an example). So once you’ve updated your blog, you should let such a service know that you have your blog has peen updated. For this, you send a PING to the service. Most of the blog software has the ability to ping on their own. But pinging a dozen such services could be time consuming.

A blog ping is just a piece of text, in simple words. It’ll contain your blog name and the url. It is usually prepared in the XML format. The servers that accept ping have special programs for accepting and processing these ‘XML pings’.