Wednesday, June 19, 2013
Renewable Energy World is pleased to make our daily content available to you via several RSS feeds.
Our RSS feeds let you quickly access our most recent headlines from an aggregator application or service, so you can be kept up-to-date with our new content daily. If you run a website, RSS feeds let you embed our syndicated headlines in your web site, which will update automatically when we post new content daily.
An RSS file is basically a list of headlines encoded so that it can be easily used by another program or web site. RSS is usually said to stand for "Really Simple Syndication" and it is relatively easy to implement and use. RSS is a form of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which means that each piece of data in the list -- a headline, a description of a story -- is coded separately so that a program will know exactly what to do with it.
Programs that know what to do with RSS files are called "news aggregators." They let you read headlines from dozens or hundreds of news sites at one time. You simply plug in the addresses of the RSS files you want, such as the ones listed above.
News aggregators have proliferated for a variety of platforms and degrees of technical expertise. Some popular ones are NewsLife (for Mac OS X), FeedDemon (for Windows), NetNewsWire (for Mac), Amphetadesk (for Windows, Linux, or Mac), KlipFolio (for Windows), and NewzCrawler (for Windows).
For web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer), there are many add-ons to integrate the RSS experience directly into the browser. You can find many of these in the respective browser "stores".
If you don't want to install any software, you might try web sites that do the aggregation for you. They have the added convenience of being available from any computer, smart phone or tablet, as long as you have an internet connection. Bloglines offers an increasingly slick interface, while Google Reader is very convenient, especially if you already have a Google account.
Another thing RSS lets you do is put our headlines on your site, which update themselves automatically when the RSS feeds update. The easiest way to do this is to use the RSS to Javascript generator that we host here. Enter the URL for one of our feeds (listed above), copy the resulting line of Javascript, and simply insert it into your site's HTML code (follow the link to the style tool for some CSS to make it look nice). If you want to do-it-yourself, WebReference has instructions for using Perl, and CaRP uses PHP (as do several other packages available online).
For more information on the implications and uses of RSS, you can read this article from the Online Journalism Review . For more on using and creating RSS feeds, turn to this tutorial from the Utah State Government .
