Explaining RSS

If you don't know already, RSS is a standard (well, kind of) format for publishing an abstracted version of a website, which is then viewable by an RSS newsreader such as NetNewsWire. You can quickly view all the latest headlines from a site, and also abstracted excerpts from the site's articles. As you might imagine, this vastly decreases the amount of time it takes to see what's new, because you can tell at a glance whether or not you need to visit a site. If you wish, you may subscribe to this site via RSS; the XML and RDF buttons on the side link to my feeds.

What's the difference between the different RSS feeds, you ask? Here's my really-quick differentiation:

RSS 1.0 (RDF): RDF is really complicated.

RSS 2.0 (XML): Dave Winer is an ass.

If you're just a casual reader (and RSS subscriber), you probably won't notice the difference. For future reference, there is an effort underway to modernize and rename the RSS standard because Dave Winer refuses to alter the current RSS 2.0 standard. This effort is known as Atom, and while Movable Type (and thus this blog) does not create Atom feeds yet, I'm sure it will soon.