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RSS, Blogging, & Aggregators Explained

Ryan J. Bonnell Skip to comments 4 Comments (Comments Closed Closed)

RSS, Atom, Aggregators, XML? What does all that mean? If you've seen the small buttons all over the web and don't know what they are for, Ryan J. Bonnell is here to help. Learn all about this new technology.

I'm Blogging This.

In a follow-up article to Justin's Tutorial on how to set-up Movable Type on OS X, we'll be covering the extremely popular bogging concept from the other angle: reading, subscribing, and keeping up to date with your favorite Weblogs and news sites using RSS Feeds.

But I know what you're thinking, "What's an RSS Feed?" or "What's a Blog" or "Why do I even care?" Yes, technology can feel quite overwhelming, but we'll try and do our best to answer the questions you might have.

The aim of this article is to uncover the mystery of Blogging, RSS Feeds, and to help you get better organized by having all of the updates to your favorite websites in the ease of one manageable program, called a News Aggregator.

So let's get stated. To better understand the nature of Blogs, Feeds, and News Aggregators, this article will be be broken up in sections, each covering the following topics:

What's a Blog, you say?

Simply put, a blog is an online journal. The word blog is short for the phrase "Web Log" A blog is a personal publishing system that let's anyone, easily publish up-to-date content to a website.

By definition:

A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is "blogging" and someone who keeps a blog is a "blogger." Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog.

Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in cronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly.

Think of a blog as a diary, or a place that people can write about topics and subject matter that interest them. Some blogs are focused and stick to a narrow subject, while other blogs can be a social outlet.

Weblogs started as a grassroots phenomenon. They weren't created in a corporate boardroom, developed to fit a need or fill a void, they were created by people with something to say.

Where did blogs start?

Before blogs became popular, people had to write their thoughts and ideas in the form of an HTML webpage, and publish those pages to a webserver. As the size and content of your website grew, so did the work, time, maintenance, and skills required to keep it running. Having a website used to require a great deal of technical expertise.

This trend of updating your website used to require tedious hours of modifying carefully crafted HTML templates. If you were knowledgeable enough, you knew about and could leverage the benefits of Server Side Includes. Before too long, however, the average website could easily get out of hand.

The first Weblog is credited to Tim Berners-Lee, the founder and creator of the language behind the Internet, HTML. He ran his own personal website at the time http://info.cern.ch/ and linked to all of the new sites as they came online.

NCSA's What's New page took the cursor for a while, then Netscape's What's New page was the big blog in the sky in 1993-96. Then all hell broke loose. The Web exploded, and the weblog idea grew along with it.

Just a few years ago, there were a small amount of Web logs on the Internet, and most of those were geared toward computer programmers. Today there are thousands and thousands of Web logs on all different types of information. There are blogs on parenting, movies, politics, health, sex, sports, comic books -- you name it. Most of the new blogging activity is happening on personal Web pages, where it's been argued that having a successful personal website is a mark of one's popularity, or existence. Today, Dave Winer of Scripting.com is credited to running the longest, continuining, self-updated weblog in existence.

For surfers, blogs cut down on the time it takes find the best reads on the Web. For writers, blogs are places to keep track of Web wanderings and to dump random thoughts. A handful of programs make creating and updating blogs quick and painless -- no knowledge of HTML is required. Blogs are for the most part simple-to-use, extremely powerful, and highly customizable, personal publishing tools.

The most popular of these is Movable Type, created by Ben & Mena Trott. Blogger is another popular web log tool and was originally created by San Francisco company Pyra Labs, and was most recently bought out by Google.

There are many Weblog packages out there worth noting. Some are completely free for non-commercial use and are easily downloadable, while others are service based, and require a monthly fee.

Some of the more common Weblogs available as the time of this writing are:

While each of the blogs have the individual features and strong points, all of them share a common characteristic:

The idea of the weblog is important: it's the essence of the Web. Individuals and small groups, communicating swiftly and directly.

RSS in layman's terms

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an XML-based format for content distribution. More simply put, RSS is a format for syndicating headlines. RSS is and can be confusing. It may be easier to look at an example of how RSS is used to better understand how it works.

Let's take for example an average day in one of our other author's lives.

When Justin Williams gets up in the morning, he does what lots of folks do: He grabs a cup of coffee and reads the news. But Justin isn't at the breakfast table. He's sitting at his Apple computer reading other people's blogs.

"Instead of reading five or six online news websites, I can go to the Web logs of five or six of my friends and instantly see what they're reading," says Williams. The twenty-something year old student, who attends Purdue University, says he reads on average 20 to 30 blogs a day.

For Justin, keeping up to date with all of the news on the web got out of hand. Even with Safari's tabbed browsing, it still took him too long to load and read all of his popular websites.

"I spent too much time skimming the pages, searching for headlines, trying to find what has changed since my last visit."

This frustration went on for quite some time, until one day he learned about RSS, and soon came across Ranchero's NetNewsWire, and it's been a torrid love affair ever since.

Hope is here.

RSS allows readers to subscribe to a syndicated feed from a website and quickly sort thru a time-based archive of that site's content. You choose what websites you want to subscribe to (often called Channels) and the New Aggregator downloads the recent headlines into the program.

With low volume websites, you may be able to quickly scan the headlines and notice what has changed, but you may feel lost on a site like Slashdot, that is updated almost hourly.

Think of it like getting an e-mail digest in your Inbox for all of your favorite websites. Instead of you having to visit a website and refresh the page, the News Aggregator "pulls" your subscribed websites, and shows you only the updated headlines. It's a huge timesavor.

So, why wade thru a whole days worth of information, when you can quickly fire up your favorite News Aggregator and catch up with all the news you've missed in just a matter of minutes?

Ryan J. BonnellRyan J. Bonnell is a Web Developer, Student, and leading contributor to MacZealots.com. When he is not playing around with his endless amount of toys, he can be reached at .

Reader Comments (4)

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1 Andy Hughes remarks:
#1) On December 22, 2003 4:37 PM

Ryan:
Thanks for the article. I look forward to part 2.

— andy

2 Restiffbard remarks:
#2) On December 23, 2003 9:52 PM

Hey, another great article. I just want to point out iBlog. It’s not as robust as something like Movable Type or any of the others you mentioned but if your host doesn’t include cgi or mysql (such as the .Mac accounts) it works wonders. Its very configurable, easy to use, and cheap at only 995 rupees or $19.95 depending on how you look at it.

Sure its not free but if you’re facing the difference between having to hand code your blog for those with a poor host or click and publish simplicity it can’t be beat.

Not to whore myself but an example of an iBlog is my own site.

3 Adam Betts remarks:
#3) On December 26, 2003 10:45 PM

That’s a damn good article. There’s lot of useful information here and I found it to be very helpful for my upcoming graphic arts weblog.

I’m looking forward to read more articles from MacZealots =)

4 Ryan J. Bonnell remarks:
#4) On March 1, 2004 8:48 PM

To the author of Comment #4 - I’d like some further clarification on your comment, to better help MacZealots develop our content.

What didn’t you like about the article? Were you expecting something different or more technical information?

When you said “I found it long yet useless.” What specifically do you mean, by useless ? Was there nothing in the article that you didn’t already know?

Leaving a comment without an explanation or further elaboration on your thoughts does nothing to enrich the quality of an article.