Feeds, Blogs, RSS ...
AgenCTEK can setup your RSS Feeds and Blogs and tie them to your website. Contact us for all your syndication needs. Let us walk you through the maze of this amazing technology. We will make it work to your ADVANTAGE. Below, we have provided some basic explanations and definitions.
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.
Programs known as feed readers or aggregators can check a list of feeds on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that they find. It is common to find web feeds on major websites and many smaller ones. Some websites let people choose between RSS or Atom formatted web feeds; others offer only RSS or only Atom.
Users of RSS content use programs called feed 'readers' or 'aggregators': the user 'subscribes' to a feed by supplying a link to that feed to their reader; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.
The initials "RSS" are variously used to refer to the following standards:
RSS formats are specified in XML (a generic specification for data formats). RSS delivers its information as an XML file called an "RSS feed", "webfeed", "RSS stream", or "RSS channel".
New Icon Standard ... 
In an effort to make the concept of syndication easier for mainstream users, the next versions of the Internet Explorer and Opera browsers will identify RSS and Atom feeds with the same icon used in Mozilla Firefox. Since the market share of these browsers tops 95 percent, the icon will become the de facto standard for syndication overnight when the next version of Microsoft Windows comes out later this year.
Feed Definitions ...
RSS is a text-based format, a type of XML. You should know that only because often RSS files are often labeled as XML. RSS version 1.0 is also RDF (whatever), which, again, is important only because an RSS file may be labeled as RDF. RSS files (which are also called RSS feeds or channels) simply contain a list of items. Usually, each item contains a title, summary, and a link to a URL (e.g. a web page). Other information, such as the date, creator’s name, etc., may also be available. The most common use for RSS files is for news and other reverse-chronologically ordered websites like blogs. For example, this particular page on Fagan Finder has a changes log, which is also available in RSS format. An item’s description may contain all of a news article, blog post, etc., or just an extract or summary. The item’s link will usually point to the full content (although it may also point to what the content itself links to). The top two icons are the most important.