RSS awareness day

Daniel Scocco over at DailyBlogTips had an admirable idea of entitling 1st of May as the “RSS Awareness Day”. He wrote about his initiative and invited everyone to get involved. Though I found out about this quite some time ago I didn’t had time or I wasn’t in the mood to write about it. However today I’ve said to myself that it’s better later than never.

I think that the best definition for RSS out there is over at Wikipedia so I’m going to quote them:

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text.

RSS keeps you updated with the latest news from your favorite blogs, sites and other web hosted entities that support RSS. Information is a very powerful asset. For example I have a feed list containing about 50 subscriptions. Every day I take some time off and read new articles from different blogs I’m interested in. It is a very effective way of being connected to the news stream. I find RSS way better than e-mail subscriptions (or newsletters) because it helps keeping my e-mail address for private use. Also you have better chances at keeping your Spam folder a little emptier because you don’t go on every blog or site and fill in your e-mail address. Basically you are just an anonymous reader out there and there is nothing that could link you to the articles you read. That, right there my friends is just a terrific possibility.

Related to feeds that display only a preview of the article. That is, in my opinion, a very bad practice. Hoping your subscribers will visit your blog to see all of the post content you forget about what is RSS all about. Provide full feeds of your articles and let your readers choose whether to visit your blog or not.

As you probably noticed the link that takes you to the RSS content of a blog or site is almost every time accompanied by the well known RSS icon. Different RSS icons are available every day as they are relatively easy to design. Check out the following resources links: