EzineArticles.com - What is RSS and How to Utilize It

So what is RSS?

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication and is a vehicle for people interested in certain topics to quickly get new information, news and other good stuff without have to wade through tons of web pages. RSS Pages are generated in XML and are not meant for the human eye, but rather for RSS Readers or Aggregators.

So how does it work?

For an EzineArticles.com specific example, let's say you would like to keep up to date on the articles of EzineArticles.com Publisher, Christopher Knight. So you arrive at Chris's Expert Autor Page here:

http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Knight

...and see the red RSS Feed Icon next to his name in Red (Hint, it looks like this: ) So you mouse over the feed icon and this handy canary yellow pop-up appears with various feed options.

As we just want the good ole RSS Feed for this example, you mouse over and click on the orange XML button ( ) and you arrive at this page:

http://ezinearticles.com/members/rss/Christopher-Knight.xml

...which looks similar to this and is quite frankly not too attractive.

But that's all right, because this really isn't meant for your eyes, but for your RSS Reader. To access this RSS Feed in your RSS Reader, you will need to take the URL of the above page ( http://ezinearticles.com/members/rss/Christopher-Knight.xml ) and then copy and paste or add it to your RSS Reader. So now that you have done this, everytime Chris posts a new article and the RSS Feed is updated you will get a notification of a new 'Headline' or article in your RSS Reader, which will give you the new article title and summary with a link to EzineArticles.com where the article is.