April 22, 2009 • 24 mins
RSS -- really simple syndication -- is a handy way to get updates from Web sites, and every user can configure his or her preferences. Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to find out how RSS works and how to use an RSS feed.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tech Stuff from how stuff Works dot Com. Join Josh
and Chuck, the guys who bring you stuff you should know,
as they take a trip around the world to help
you get smarter in a topsy turv economy. Check out
(00:20):
the all new super Stuff Guide to the Economy from
how stuff Works dot Com, available now exclusively on iTunes.
Hello everybody, and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is
Chris Poulette. I'm an editor here at how stuff Works
dot com and sitting next to me as usual to
join the discussion as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Good eye, Yeah, okay,
(00:44):
what's that all about? Well, today I thought we would
take our discussion from a topic that was sent in
from a listener, So let me quickly read this suggestion.
Hi guys, my name is Nick. I am from Australia
and I love the podcast. I got it. Yeah, I
was searching the web recently when I stumbled over something
which has been annoying me for a while. Now. What
(01:07):
is an RSS feed and how do they work? Thanks? Well, Nick,
I figure that's what we're gonna tackle is, um, RSS feeds. Yeah,
and uh, and chances are you are listening to this
podcast thanks in no small part to at least some
sort of variation of the RSS feed. That's true. That's true.
And wait a minute, you know you mean of all
(01:29):
the articles on the site that I've written, which is
what four or five? Now you picked one that I
actually wrote. Yeah, yeah, out of all the thousands and
thousands of articles on how Stuff Works, I decided to
go with one that Pallette himself uh penned or typed.
I guess you didn't really pen it. But um, yeah,
if you go to how Stuff Works and you search
for RSS, you'll see that our own Chris Pallette wrote
(01:50):
the article on it, so I figure he's an expert.
It's a trap. Anyway, Let's let's go ahead and kind
of give you a sort of a quick introduction to
r SS. Uh. It all goes back to nine. Wow,
I remember it well when we're teaching the world to laugh, remember, well, Yeah,
it was a very good year. So, um, RSS stands
(02:13):
for a couple of things, depending on who you ask,
the the most common uh form of our or the
most common what would you say, like, the most common
name for RSS is really simple syndication. Um, that's that's
how most people just translate the RSS. But that's not
necessarily the only way to break out that acronym. That's true. Um, Actually,
(02:38):
it had had a different name assigned to it by
the person who basically put it together. His name is
Dave Winer, and if you're a tech nut then you
probably recognize his name. He's had a lot to do
with the blogging over the years. And um, he actually
had a hand in creating rs S, the RSS technology. Um,
(02:58):
and it had another name. But it's funny because I
think everybody thought that RSS was supposed to stand for
really simple syndication, because it really is simple to syndicate
using these feeds. Yeah, you might have heard of it
also as r DF site summary or rich Site summary. Yeah. Yeah,
and uh, those names not exactly the coolest names. Yeah,
(03:21):
it's and yeah, it gets a little more difficult to
explain what r S S is when you think of
it that way. When you think really simple syndication, you
already have kind of an idea of what RSS is
supposed to do. It's supposed to syndicate information across the web.
And what does that mean. Well, it means that instead
of you having to go to multiple destinations on the
(03:42):
web to look up information, you know, information that changes
over time, you would have the this subscription service where
you would subscribe to a feed of information and that
would serve it to you in some form, like whether
it's a website, like a portal web site like eye, Google,
or a desktop RSS reader anything like that, so you
(04:06):
can get information from multiple sources packaged in a single
view that way. That's true. Um, And uh, just as
a quick thing about the name, apparently Mr Weiner thought
it was a really cool name too, because he adopted
it in the last specification that he released for rs s,
which is RSS two point oh. Um. But uh, it's
(04:27):
it's funny because the really simple part is very very
apt because there's really not a whole lot to it.
RSS feeds are essentially a different form of web page
rather than being an HTML, which is hypertext markup language UM,
which is basically how a web page tells your browser
to format it with the different fonts, the different size fonts,
(04:49):
bold italic, underline, you know, all those little things pictures
that kind of Yeah, exactly where to put the photos
whether or not to invent a chunk of flash. I mean,
that's essentially what an h TAMIL page does. And if
you were to go up to your browser and view
the source of the document, you would see that basically,
all the text in the document itself, unless it's part
of a picture, is you know, just surrounded by a
(05:11):
couple of tags. So it's it's you know, it may
not necessarily be programming, but it is, you know, one
of the closest things. It's sort of that in between
phase where you're actually doing stuff to text to make
it work differently in a computer, but you're not actually
programming a lot of it. UM the thing is uh
RSS and it's cousin ADAM basically use a cousin of
(05:33):
the UH The HTML specification called XML, which stands for
Extensible Markup Language UM and the thing. The difference in
the two is essentially, I mean, they are very closely related,
but XML lets you create your own tags. Like for example,
if you had bold or B for bold um in
HTML and you wanted to make it do something completely different, well,
(05:56):
you're kind of stuck because the HTML specification is very limited. XML,
on the other hand, as long as you tell it
what each thing means. You could say, you can have
something with lots of names and addresses in it, and
you can create an address tag and based on the
difference is you have to tell it what the address
tag means, you say, oh, well always bold anything in
(06:16):
the address tag. Okay, well, now I know what that means.
I can display it that way. Right. So XML is
just a really flexible form of HTML. Yeah, it's it's
really um, it's it's difficult to explain in a way
that uh, that's you know, very succinct. But but the
other thing you can think of as XML allows you
to define, uh, the contents of a text file in
(06:39):
different ways. Now, when when you're using a web browser
to search for information your computer, like let's say you're searching,
you're actually using a search engine like Google. Um, Google
doesn't necessarily know what it is you're searching for. It's
looking for certain keywords um in my depending on the algorithm,
(06:59):
look at the history of search as you've done, so
that it can get an idea of oh, when this
person types in UM, the letters in I C E. Uh,
this person is actually looking for nice France, not nice, right,
like but otherwise otherwise the computer doesn't know that. The
computer can't tell it, it can't understand context. Um. XML
(07:23):
is one of those ways where you can you can
create meta data, which is this this sort of attempt
to kind of teach computers context, but it's all still
human defined. Essentially, metadata is data about data, right, So
it's all the characteristics of the information that you're putting
in that text file. So if you create a reader
(07:45):
that can read certain kinds of tags that you've defined
in x mL, so so both the content wherever you're
putting it up and the reader itself use these same definitions.
That's what allows you to access that particular kind of information.
So with RSS, that's what we're talking about. They both
that both the reader and the information that you've tagged
(08:06):
have this particular kind of x m L in it
um if the nice thing is there are a lot
of different UH web services out there that automate RSS
if you want to use it, Like there are a
lot of blogging systems that use some form of r
SS automatically so that someone can subscribe to your blog
and every time you update it when that person logs
(08:28):
in there there RSS reader will look for the most
recent information from your your blog. Now, Um, putting it
in like the RSS information into a website that doesn't
have it automated is a little more complicated. Well, it's
a little bit more complicated, but basically an EXCEL document
(08:49):
essentially has to have something somewhere else that the computer
can look to to find out what all these little
funny tags mean. I mean that the brow the web
browser is going to know that stuff in between the
greater than a less stand sign. Um, Basically that's a tag.
But if if they're not HTML tags, it's gonna say, well,
I don't know what this is unless you tell me
where to go to get the information about this. So um,
(09:12):
that's that's the point of RSS or ADAM is that
these are definitions. Um. Otherwise the page that your RSS
feed is based on is just an XML document with
no that doesn't explain how to interpret that information and
there's no context. So yeah, I mean it's it's it's
a little simpler than it would be if you were
putting in another XML because otherwise you'd have to define
(09:35):
all those elements yourself. You could do it if you
really want to, but then you have to tell every
time you create a web page with the essentially the
RSS information, and you'd have to say, well, you have
you know, when you open this page, look for this
document on this server and it will be there. You
really need to have a good familiarity with HTML and
probably I would say JavaScript too before you really tackled it.
(09:58):
And UM, I'm sorry, no, no, ahead, I was just
gonna say that. Um. So, the nice thing is that
RSS and and ADAM are accepted specifications, so you know,
they're very common if you use Blogger or WordPress or
you know a lot of other different tools. Basically, when
you create a blog, it'll probably it'll ask you if
you want in RSS feed, and if you do, it
(10:19):
will go ahead and create that document along with all
the other documents in your blog, so you really don't
have to mess with it. And then you just you know,
people who come to visit your blog, Um, see, if
you were visiting the tech Stuff blog could click on
the RSS logo and subscribe to it if you were
the user. And the same thing is true for things
like podcasts. Like we said, um, you can find our podcast,
(10:41):
for example, on iTunes, which has its own sort of
uh way of checking up for the latest information to
make sure that you have the latest editions of whatever
podcasts you've subscribed to. But there are other uh, podcast
hosting sites out there that you can you can go
to and just subscribe via RSS and not have to
go through iTunes if you don't want to. That's true.
(11:03):
It's it's just a it's basically just an XML file saying, UM,
you know, this will be updated every so often. Please
check back. This is where the files will be found
and um every time you're Uh. This is the neat
part because the specification is so widespread. If you're using Maya,
Who or Eye, Google or you know news Gator, or
(11:25):
you know, even the software browsers, Um, you know the
a lot of the web browsers now have they built in.
Some of the mail programs haven't built in now. I
mean you, RSS is so ubiquitous now that you can
read RSS feeds and just about anything. You just have
to know the U r L of the r s
S document, the XL document for the RSS feed, tell
it where to look, and uh, basically you're off and running. Yeah,
(11:48):
And there's there are a lot of portal sites out
there that, um that make this even easier. Like I
mentioned I Google before, if you have a Google account,
then you pretty much can you know, just go ahead
and start creating or eye Google page. If you don't
have a Google account, well they're free, so you can
go ahead and make one. You know, they're gonna rule
us all at one day anyway, so you might as
well go ahead and get on the train now. Um,
(12:09):
but I Google you you can create a little windows
that hold essentially RSS newsreaders for or or well RSS
feed readers I guess you could say, for pretty much
anything you can think of, and that has a very
easy search tool you can use to search for specific
UM feeds if you want, uh. And you can even
(12:31):
organize it by category, so you could have an entire
page just dedicated to entertainment. You could have one dedicated
to technology. I am currently explaining my own eye Google page.
Well you can, um, I mean that That's the thing
is the readers like that and and net vibes and
page flakes. Basically they break each individual read into its
(12:52):
own box and so you might see five or six,
five or ten uh current news stories in there. UM
Google Reader is a different version where you can incorporate
all your feeds into one big long list and it
can go on forever and ever and ever. Or you
can organize them into folders and read just the ones
in the folder, or read feed by feed right, which
(13:13):
for me would be overwhelming. Uh, it's a lot. It
can be a lot. If you have, you know, and
you started to a lot of feeds, it's gonna fill up.
I mean, even if you're checking multiple times a day.
You got to remember, all of these web pages are
updating pretty frequently. Actually, that's that's the reason why RSS
is really so valuable today. Now, back when I started
using the web, and I'm sure it's the same for
(13:34):
Poulette here. Um, websites didn't change that often because it
was a pain in the butt to change a web page. Um.
So web page is really served as sort of a static,
you know, information page, if you will. It was something
that was meant to give you some information, but it
wasn't necessarily going to update very often. So um, and
(13:57):
then there's this big thing called push that was supposed
to change ja all that, and it kind of didn't.
But then basically what it was gonna do was start
web pages, We're gonna start pushing information out to your computer, um,
and you hear it every once in a while. It
sort of resurrects every once in a while and people say, oh, well,
this is really going to be pushed, and everyone goes, yeah, yeah.
But RSS is kind of like push even though it's
(14:18):
it's pull. Your computer is pulling information for all these feeds.
But uh, the websites are updating regularly. So if your
computer says, you know, go to ce NN dot com
and check the RSS feed, Oh, there's four new stories.
Let's pull them down, and it pulls down just a
little bit of the story, usually as much as the
RS And this is the part of the XML. It says,
you know, pull down this much of the headline and
(14:41):
half a paragraph of copy, and just that that way
you are. You have the incentive to click on a
link to go to the the actual page that has
that information on it, because you could imagine if you
allowed an entire page of text to come through a reader,
there'd be no reason to visit that that host page. Well,
(15:04):
you know, if you don't visit that host page, then
the hosts right exactly, the host is not going to
get any eyes on any of the advertisements that they
use in order to fund the web page. And it is,
after all, how they're making money off of you coming
to their website. Right, So, if you were using an
RSS reader to read everything, and you didn't ever have
to visit anyone ever again, then pretty soon those sites
(15:26):
wouldn't have any revenue streams coming in, and then you
wouldn't have anyone to read anyway, because they'd all be gone. Yeah. Yeah,
well that's uh, that's one of the advantages of forking
over a few dollars for an RSS reader or finding
a free one. Um, do you ever use any software RSS?
I just have. I just use Eye Google. It's just
my that's my go to I use. I use a
(15:48):
combination of I, Google and Twitter to stay up to
date on everything. All right, Well, I've I've used lots
and lots and lots of different readers, most of them
for the Macintosh. But uh, NewsGator actually used to be
a different sort of company, but they sort of specialized
now into RSS feeds and acquired two of the very
(16:08):
very best and made them free. Actually both of them
are shareware and and NewsGator has made them free. One
of them is feed Demon that's for Windows and you
can actually sink to your your account, your NewsGator account
with both of these. So if you have a Windows
computer on your desktop at work and then use a
Mac at home, you might use net Newswire for the Mac,
which is an awesome feed readers, my favorite of all
(16:30):
of them. Uh, and there are lots of really neat
ones UM and it will sink up the changes so
that you don't have to worry about going I've read that,
I've read that. Man, I've read all these. Well, you
know what's going on. This is pointless. You don't have
to worry about that with those with that sink and
um you know they're they're tons and tons of others.
UM news Owl is one that's free and uh, you know,
(16:53):
you can even get Thunderbird Mozilla Thunderbird to read your
RSS feeds and that's good on Mac Windows Analytics. And
we should point out that not everyone is super happy
with r s s UM. I can think of one
organization in particular that's been getting although although the ire
of this particular organization has been directed not at r
S S in particular, more towards just the web in general.
(17:17):
That'd be the Associated Press a P so ap. The
Their beef is that, UM, you know a lot of
people are citing AP reports for their UH in their
own news articles. So you're seeing this pop up in
on news sites and especially on blogs. And the problem
(17:38):
is that if you're using this information, um and and
there's no real incentive for the reader to go back
to the original report, AP feels like it's doing all
the legwork and getting none of the eyeballs. So UH,
there's there's this big issue now, um AP says, I
think it's something like, gosh, I can't remember more than
(18:00):
maybe five sentences or something is UH is too much,
you can't quote more than that. UM, I'm probably have
that wrong. If I do, go ahead and write me,
write me a nice little letter. UM. But because I
didn't write this down for my notes, I just happened
to have heard it off off hand. But their their
point is that they don't want people using their content
(18:22):
to get eyes when they could be getting those eyes.
So now, one of the interesting things is both AP
and the Wall Street Journal have had these kind of
issues recently. UM and they they sort of are in
some ways indirectly attacking UH search engines like Google, because
I'm sure if any of you have done a Google search,
and I don't know that anyone out there listening to
(18:43):
this has never done one. If you haven't, here's what
you can expect. You search for something on Google, you're
gonna get linked names, and then you'll get a small
excerpt from the website underneath the link explaining it. So
in the case of an ap are nicle or perhaps
even a Wall Street Journal article, you might get the
(19:03):
the headline of the article, plus some of the body
of the text. Um. Some people say that that's too much.
And you know that even that is too much, like
you're giving away too much. People are just reading the
summary and there's no need for them to go to
the website to read more. Um. I think it would
be a monumentally bad decision two demand that information be removed,
(19:30):
because can you imagine how much traffic would plummet if
Google said, you know what, fine, We're removing all of
your links from our search results. No longer will we
ever link to any ap content whatsoever, will only link
to other websites that have that that relate to whatever
search result that is. Can you imagine how traffic would dip? Well?
(19:54):
And it might, but well, look at look at this.
Though the AP makes their money, it makes it's money. Sorry,
I am an editor. The AP makes its money from
newspapers that subscribe to its services. And if we are
all running around, if if one newspaper, I mean you know,
there are tons and tons of newspapers that are are going,
(20:14):
um bankrupt, and some of them are going out of business,
some of them are going web only. Um, if it
ends up where say the Sacramento B is the last
one standing and everybody's ripping off the AP headlines, then um,
you know they nobody's everybody will stop going to the
Sacramento B. Their advertisers are going to bolt and they're
(20:35):
gonna go under two, and so will the AP. So
they're they're defending their you know. My argument there then
is why let that why let the AP articles remain
publicly available? Why not password protect them or subscribe or
protect them, because if you're if they're freely available on
the web through some website, then you know pretty much
(20:56):
everyone's gonna grab it anyway. Yeah, that's that's true, and
I think is probably why you see UH articles on
some websites where you can only read part of the
first paragraph and UH In fact, I saw an article
just the other day in which Wall Street Times owner
Rupert Murdoch is saying that all newspapers should make their
websites for pay only. I'm sort of paraphrasing and oversimplifying,
(21:20):
but yeah, I mean he's saying that if you want
to stay afloat, you're gonna have to find ways to
make money, and this is a great way to do it.
I think the horse is already out of the barn. Unfortunately.
Well we'll see. I guess they've gotta they're they're gonna
try to protect themselves, that's for sure. At any rate, Nick,
I hope we answered your question about RSS feeds and
how so. I guess that just brings us around two. Well,
(21:42):
you know what, it brings us around too, right, But
WoT I thought we were already doing. No, I've got
man listener mail. Now I have a bigger headache. So
this listener mail comes from Okay, I'm guessing that's the
correct pronunciation. Should you can write me a saw and
tell me that I get it wrong. Guys, you forgot
(22:04):
to mention the April Fools joke that came out a
year or two ago. The YouTube video on Legend of
Zelda the movie coming out on April one, two thousand nine.
This one had a lot of Zelda fanboys drooling myself included,
um yeah, there were tons and tons of April Fools
jokes that we couldn't get to and people exactly and
people send us many many responses and saying, hey, you
(22:27):
forgot this one. We didn't necessarily forget them, We just
didn't have enough time to go into it or else
that would have been an hour long podcast. But that
one is a pretty good uh joke there. I've also
seen I mean, now, granted, I'm a big fan of
fan made trailers and uh, you know trailers that were
made by by people who, um, we're doing it a
(22:49):
sort of a film project that where there's no real movie,
the trailer is the film. And there are a couple
of really good ones out there. For example, Grayson is
probably one of my favorites, which of course is about
the the man who once was Robin of Batman and
Robin fame and he has to solve a murder mystery
and m and it includes pretty much every d C
(23:12):
character you can think of. In a little flash at
some point in that preview and not the flash, but
the but the preview is the previous, very very impressive,
and at the end of it you're like, oh, when
is that coming out? And then you realize, oh wait,
that was the movie. Um, and then of course you
really did see it all then. I also like gob Stopper,
which was a funny or die video clip is just
(23:33):
a joke, but it was a horror movie version of
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring Christopher Lloyd as
the demented Willy Wonka. Uh. It is awesome. UM, So
if you haven't seen it, check it out. Don't check
it out at work. Um. That's all I have to
say about that, all right, So thanks very much for
that listener mail. If any of you want to write in,
(23:56):
you can write us tech stuff at how stuff works
dot com. We have blogs up. You can find that
at how stuff works dot com. Look over in the
right hand side you'll see the blogs listed. And keep
your eyes peeled because on Fridays I'm going to start
wrapping up our podcast discussions in a blog post, so
that if you have anything you want to contribute to
the discussion, you can write into the comments there and
(24:17):
I'll be responding as well. Who knows, we might even
get Pullette to respond once in a while, um, if
he feels up to it, because you know, Fridays are
tough days for editors here. Yes, that's no joke. They've
got a lot of work to do on Fridays. But
we will talk to you again really soon. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
(24:39):
works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two
thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
tech Stuff from how stuff Works dot Com. Join Josh
and Chuck, the guys who bring you stuff you should know,
as they take a trip around the world to help
you get smarter in a topsy turv economy. Check out
(00:20):
the all new super Stuff Guide to the Economy from
how stuff Works dot Com, available now exclusively on iTunes.
Hello everybody, and welcome to tech Stuff. My name is
Chris Poulette. I'm an editor here at how stuff Works
dot com and sitting next to me as usual to
join the discussion as senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Good eye, Yeah, okay,
(00:44):
what's that all about? Well, today I thought we would
take our discussion from a topic that was sent in
from a listener, So let me quickly read this suggestion.
Hi guys, my name is Nick. I am from Australia
and I love the podcast. I got it. Yeah, I
was searching the web recently when I stumbled over something
which has been annoying me for a while. Now. What
(01:07):
is an RSS feed and how do they work? Thanks? Well, Nick,
I figure that's what we're gonna tackle is, um, RSS feeds. Yeah,
and uh, and chances are you are listening to this
podcast thanks in no small part to at least some
sort of variation of the RSS feed. That's true. That's true.
And wait a minute, you know you mean of all
(01:29):
the articles on the site that I've written, which is
what four or five? Now you picked one that I
actually wrote. Yeah, yeah, out of all the thousands and
thousands of articles on how Stuff Works, I decided to
go with one that Pallette himself uh penned or typed.
I guess you didn't really pen it. But um, yeah,
if you go to how Stuff Works and you search
for RSS, you'll see that our own Chris Pallette wrote
(01:50):
the article on it, so I figure he's an expert.
It's a trap. Anyway, Let's let's go ahead and kind
of give you a sort of a quick introduction to
r SS. Uh. It all goes back to nine. Wow,
I remember it well when we're teaching the world to laugh, remember, well, Yeah,
it was a very good year. So, um, RSS stands
(02:13):
for a couple of things, depending on who you ask,
the the most common uh form of our or the
most common what would you say, like, the most common
name for RSS is really simple syndication. Um, that's that's
how most people just translate the RSS. But that's not
necessarily the only way to break out that acronym. That's true. Um, Actually,
(02:38):
it had had a different name assigned to it by
the person who basically put it together. His name is
Dave Winer, and if you're a tech nut then you
probably recognize his name. He's had a lot to do
with the blogging over the years. And um, he actually
had a hand in creating rs S, the RSS technology. Um,
(02:58):
and it had another name. But it's funny because I
think everybody thought that RSS was supposed to stand for
really simple syndication, because it really is simple to syndicate
using these feeds. Yeah, you might have heard of it
also as r DF site summary or rich Site summary. Yeah. Yeah,
and uh, those names not exactly the coolest names. Yeah,
(03:21):
it's and yeah, it gets a little more difficult to
explain what r S S is when you think of
it that way. When you think really simple syndication, you
already have kind of an idea of what RSS is
supposed to do. It's supposed to syndicate information across the web.
And what does that mean. Well, it means that instead
of you having to go to multiple destinations on the
(03:42):
web to look up information, you know, information that changes
over time, you would have the this subscription service where
you would subscribe to a feed of information and that
would serve it to you in some form, like whether
it's a website, like a portal web site like eye, Google,
or a desktop RSS reader anything like that, so you
(04:06):
can get information from multiple sources packaged in a single
view that way. That's true. Um, And uh, just as
a quick thing about the name, apparently Mr Weiner thought
it was a really cool name too, because he adopted
it in the last specification that he released for rs s,
which is RSS two point oh. Um. But uh, it's
(04:27):
it's funny because the really simple part is very very
apt because there's really not a whole lot to it.
RSS feeds are essentially a different form of web page
rather than being an HTML, which is hypertext markup language UM,
which is basically how a web page tells your browser
to format it with the different fonts, the different size fonts,
(04:49):
bold italic, underline, you know, all those little things pictures
that kind of Yeah, exactly where to put the photos
whether or not to invent a chunk of flash. I mean,
that's essentially what an h TAMIL page does. And if
you were to go up to your browser and view
the source of the document, you would see that basically,
all the text in the document itself, unless it's part
of a picture, is you know, just surrounded by a
(05:11):
couple of tags. So it's it's you know, it may
not necessarily be programming, but it is, you know, one
of the closest things. It's sort of that in between
phase where you're actually doing stuff to text to make
it work differently in a computer, but you're not actually
programming a lot of it. UM the thing is uh
RSS and it's cousin ADAM basically use a cousin of
(05:33):
the UH The HTML specification called XML, which stands for
Extensible Markup Language UM and the thing. The difference in
the two is essentially, I mean, they are very closely related,
but XML lets you create your own tags. Like for example,
if you had bold or B for bold um in
HTML and you wanted to make it do something completely different, well,
(05:56):
you're kind of stuck because the HTML specification is very limited. XML,
on the other hand, as long as you tell it
what each thing means. You could say, you can have
something with lots of names and addresses in it, and
you can create an address tag and based on the
difference is you have to tell it what the address
tag means, you say, oh, well always bold anything in
(06:16):
the address tag. Okay, well, now I know what that means.
I can display it that way. Right. So XML is
just a really flexible form of HTML. Yeah, it's it's
really um, it's it's difficult to explain in a way
that uh, that's you know, very succinct. But but the
other thing you can think of as XML allows you
to define, uh, the contents of a text file in
(06:39):
different ways. Now, when when you're using a web browser
to search for information your computer, like let's say you're searching,
you're actually using a search engine like Google. Um, Google
doesn't necessarily know what it is you're searching for. It's
looking for certain keywords um in my depending on the algorithm,
(06:59):
look at the history of search as you've done, so
that it can get an idea of oh, when this
person types in UM, the letters in I C E. Uh,
this person is actually looking for nice France, not nice, right,
like but otherwise otherwise the computer doesn't know that. The
computer can't tell it, it can't understand context. Um. XML
(07:23):
is one of those ways where you can you can
create meta data, which is this this sort of attempt
to kind of teach computers context, but it's all still
human defined. Essentially, metadata is data about data, right, So
it's all the characteristics of the information that you're putting
in that text file. So if you create a reader
(07:45):
that can read certain kinds of tags that you've defined
in x mL, so so both the content wherever you're
putting it up and the reader itself use these same definitions.
That's what allows you to access that particular kind of information.
So with RSS, that's what we're talking about. They both
that both the reader and the information that you've tagged
(08:06):
have this particular kind of x m L in it
um if the nice thing is there are a lot
of different UH web services out there that automate RSS
if you want to use it, Like there are a
lot of blogging systems that use some form of r
SS automatically so that someone can subscribe to your blog
and every time you update it when that person logs
(08:28):
in there there RSS reader will look for the most
recent information from your your blog. Now, Um, putting it
in like the RSS information into a website that doesn't
have it automated is a little more complicated. Well, it's
a little bit more complicated, but basically an EXCEL document
(08:49):
essentially has to have something somewhere else that the computer
can look to to find out what all these little
funny tags mean. I mean that the brow the web
browser is going to know that stuff in between the
greater than a less stand sign. Um, Basically that's a tag.
But if if they're not HTML tags, it's gonna say, well,
I don't know what this is unless you tell me
where to go to get the information about this. So um,
(09:12):
that's that's the point of RSS or ADAM is that
these are definitions. Um. Otherwise the page that your RSS
feed is based on is just an XML document with
no that doesn't explain how to interpret that information and
there's no context. So yeah, I mean it's it's it's
a little simpler than it would be if you were
putting in another XML because otherwise you'd have to define
(09:35):
all those elements yourself. You could do it if you
really want to, but then you have to tell every
time you create a web page with the essentially the
RSS information, and you'd have to say, well, you have
you know, when you open this page, look for this
document on this server and it will be there. You
really need to have a good familiarity with HTML and
probably I would say JavaScript too before you really tackled it.
(09:58):
And UM, I'm sorry, no, no, ahead, I was just
gonna say that. Um. So, the nice thing is that
RSS and and ADAM are accepted specifications, so you know,
they're very common if you use Blogger or WordPress or
you know a lot of other different tools. Basically, when
you create a blog, it'll probably it'll ask you if
you want in RSS feed, and if you do, it
(10:19):
will go ahead and create that document along with all
the other documents in your blog, so you really don't
have to mess with it. And then you just you know,
people who come to visit your blog, Um, see, if
you were visiting the tech Stuff blog could click on
the RSS logo and subscribe to it if you were
the user. And the same thing is true for things
like podcasts. Like we said, um, you can find our podcast,
(10:41):
for example, on iTunes, which has its own sort of
uh way of checking up for the latest information to
make sure that you have the latest editions of whatever
podcasts you've subscribed to. But there are other uh, podcast
hosting sites out there that you can you can go
to and just subscribe via RSS and not have to
go through iTunes if you don't want to. That's true.
(11:03):
It's it's just a it's basically just an XML file saying, UM,
you know, this will be updated every so often. Please
check back. This is where the files will be found
and um every time you're Uh. This is the neat
part because the specification is so widespread. If you're using Maya,
Who or Eye, Google or you know news Gator, or
(11:25):
you know, even the software browsers, Um, you know the
a lot of the web browsers now have they built in.
Some of the mail programs haven't built in now. I
mean you, RSS is so ubiquitous now that you can
read RSS feeds and just about anything. You just have
to know the U r L of the r s
S document, the XL document for the RSS feed, tell
it where to look, and uh, basically you're off and running. Yeah,
(11:48):
And there's there are a lot of portal sites out
there that, um that make this even easier. Like I
mentioned I Google before, if you have a Google account,
then you pretty much can you know, just go ahead
and start creating or eye Google page. If you don't
have a Google account, well they're free, so you can
go ahead and make one. You know, they're gonna rule
us all at one day anyway, so you might as
well go ahead and get on the train now. Um,
(12:09):
but I Google you you can create a little windows
that hold essentially RSS newsreaders for or or well RSS
feed readers I guess you could say, for pretty much
anything you can think of, and that has a very
easy search tool you can use to search for specific
UM feeds if you want, uh. And you can even
(12:31):
organize it by category, so you could have an entire
page just dedicated to entertainment. You could have one dedicated
to technology. I am currently explaining my own eye Google page.
Well you can, um, I mean that That's the thing
is the readers like that and and net vibes and
page flakes. Basically they break each individual read into its
(12:52):
own box and so you might see five or six,
five or ten uh current news stories in there. UM
Google Reader is a different version where you can incorporate
all your feeds into one big long list and it
can go on forever and ever and ever. Or you
can organize them into folders and read just the ones
in the folder, or read feed by feed right, which
(13:13):
for me would be overwhelming. Uh, it's a lot. It
can be a lot. If you have, you know, and
you started to a lot of feeds, it's gonna fill up.
I mean, even if you're checking multiple times a day.
You got to remember, all of these web pages are
updating pretty frequently. Actually, that's that's the reason why RSS
is really so valuable today. Now, back when I started
using the web, and I'm sure it's the same for
(13:34):
Poulette here. Um, websites didn't change that often because it
was a pain in the butt to change a web page. Um.
So web page is really served as sort of a static,
you know, information page, if you will. It was something
that was meant to give you some information, but it
wasn't necessarily going to update very often. So um, and
(13:57):
then there's this big thing called push that was supposed
to change ja all that, and it kind of didn't.
But then basically what it was gonna do was start
web pages, We're gonna start pushing information out to your computer, um,
and you hear it every once in a while. It
sort of resurrects every once in a while and people say, oh, well,
this is really going to be pushed, and everyone goes, yeah, yeah.
But RSS is kind of like push even though it's
(14:18):
it's pull. Your computer is pulling information for all these feeds.
But uh, the websites are updating regularly. So if your
computer says, you know, go to ce NN dot com
and check the RSS feed, Oh, there's four new stories.
Let's pull them down, and it pulls down just a
little bit of the story, usually as much as the
RS And this is the part of the XML. It says,
you know, pull down this much of the headline and
(14:41):
half a paragraph of copy, and just that that way
you are. You have the incentive to click on a
link to go to the the actual page that has
that information on it, because you could imagine if you
allowed an entire page of text to come through a reader,
there'd be no reason to visit that that host page. Well,
(15:04):
you know, if you don't visit that host page, then
the hosts right exactly, the host is not going to
get any eyes on any of the advertisements that they
use in order to fund the web page. And it is,
after all, how they're making money off of you coming
to their website. Right, So, if you were using an
RSS reader to read everything, and you didn't ever have
to visit anyone ever again, then pretty soon those sites
(15:26):
wouldn't have any revenue streams coming in, and then you
wouldn't have anyone to read anyway, because they'd all be gone. Yeah. Yeah,
well that's uh, that's one of the advantages of forking
over a few dollars for an RSS reader or finding
a free one. Um, do you ever use any software RSS?
I just have. I just use Eye Google. It's just
my that's my go to I use. I use a
(15:48):
combination of I, Google and Twitter to stay up to
date on everything. All right, Well, I've I've used lots
and lots and lots of different readers, most of them
for the Macintosh. But uh, NewsGator actually used to be
a different sort of company, but they sort of specialized
now into RSS feeds and acquired two of the very
(16:08):
very best and made them free. Actually both of them
are shareware and and NewsGator has made them free. One
of them is feed Demon that's for Windows and you
can actually sink to your your account, your NewsGator account
with both of these. So if you have a Windows
computer on your desktop at work and then use a
Mac at home, you might use net Newswire for the Mac,
which is an awesome feed readers, my favorite of all
(16:30):
of them. Uh, and there are lots of really neat
ones UM and it will sink up the changes so
that you don't have to worry about going I've read that,
I've read that. Man, I've read all these. Well, you
know what's going on. This is pointless. You don't have
to worry about that with those with that sink and
um you know they're they're tons and tons of others.
UM news Owl is one that's free and uh, you know,
(16:53):
you can even get Thunderbird Mozilla Thunderbird to read your
RSS feeds and that's good on Mac Windows Analytics. And
we should point out that not everyone is super happy
with r s s UM. I can think of one
organization in particular that's been getting although although the ire
of this particular organization has been directed not at r
S S in particular, more towards just the web in general.
(17:17):
That'd be the Associated Press a P so ap. The
Their beef is that, UM, you know a lot of
people are citing AP reports for their UH in their
own news articles. So you're seeing this pop up in
on news sites and especially on blogs. And the problem
(17:38):
is that if you're using this information, um and and
there's no real incentive for the reader to go back
to the original report, AP feels like it's doing all
the legwork and getting none of the eyeballs. So UH,
there's there's this big issue now, um AP says, I
think it's something like, gosh, I can't remember more than
(18:00):
maybe five sentences or something is UH is too much,
you can't quote more than that. UM, I'm probably have
that wrong. If I do, go ahead and write me,
write me a nice little letter. UM. But because I
didn't write this down for my notes, I just happened
to have heard it off off hand. But their their
point is that they don't want people using their content
(18:22):
to get eyes when they could be getting those eyes.
So now, one of the interesting things is both AP
and the Wall Street Journal have had these kind of
issues recently. UM and they they sort of are in
some ways indirectly attacking UH search engines like Google, because
I'm sure if any of you have done a Google search,
and I don't know that anyone out there listening to
(18:43):
this has never done one. If you haven't, here's what
you can expect. You search for something on Google, you're
gonna get linked names, and then you'll get a small
excerpt from the website underneath the link explaining it. So
in the case of an ap are nicle or perhaps
even a Wall Street Journal article, you might get the
(19:03):
the headline of the article, plus some of the body
of the text. Um. Some people say that that's too much.
And you know that even that is too much, like
you're giving away too much. People are just reading the
summary and there's no need for them to go to
the website to read more. Um. I think it would
be a monumentally bad decision two demand that information be removed,
(19:30):
because can you imagine how much traffic would plummet if
Google said, you know what, fine, We're removing all of
your links from our search results. No longer will we
ever link to any ap content whatsoever, will only link
to other websites that have that that relate to whatever
search result that is. Can you imagine how traffic would dip? Well?
(19:54):
And it might, but well, look at look at this.
Though the AP makes their money, it makes it's money. Sorry,
I am an editor. The AP makes its money from
newspapers that subscribe to its services. And if we are
all running around, if if one newspaper, I mean you know,
there are tons and tons of newspapers that are are going,
(20:14):
um bankrupt, and some of them are going out of business,
some of them are going web only. Um, if it
ends up where say the Sacramento B is the last
one standing and everybody's ripping off the AP headlines, then um,
you know they nobody's everybody will stop going to the
Sacramento B. Their advertisers are going to bolt and they're
(20:35):
gonna go under two, and so will the AP. So
they're they're defending their you know. My argument there then
is why let that why let the AP articles remain
publicly available? Why not password protect them or subscribe or
protect them, because if you're if they're freely available on
the web through some website, then you know pretty much
(20:56):
everyone's gonna grab it anyway. Yeah, that's that's true, and
I think is probably why you see UH articles on
some websites where you can only read part of the
first paragraph and UH In fact, I saw an article
just the other day in which Wall Street Times owner
Rupert Murdoch is saying that all newspapers should make their
websites for pay only. I'm sort of paraphrasing and oversimplifying,
(21:20):
but yeah, I mean he's saying that if you want
to stay afloat, you're gonna have to find ways to
make money, and this is a great way to do it.
I think the horse is already out of the barn. Unfortunately.
Well we'll see. I guess they've gotta they're they're gonna
try to protect themselves, that's for sure. At any rate, Nick,
I hope we answered your question about RSS feeds and
how so. I guess that just brings us around two. Well,
(21:42):
you know what, it brings us around too, right, But
WoT I thought we were already doing. No, I've got
man listener mail. Now I have a bigger headache. So
this listener mail comes from Okay, I'm guessing that's the
correct pronunciation. Should you can write me a saw and
tell me that I get it wrong. Guys, you forgot
(22:04):
to mention the April Fools joke that came out a
year or two ago. The YouTube video on Legend of
Zelda the movie coming out on April one, two thousand nine.
This one had a lot of Zelda fanboys drooling myself included,
um yeah, there were tons and tons of April Fools
jokes that we couldn't get to and people exactly and
people send us many many responses and saying, hey, you
(22:27):
forgot this one. We didn't necessarily forget them, We just
didn't have enough time to go into it or else
that would have been an hour long podcast. But that
one is a pretty good uh joke there. I've also
seen I mean, now, granted, I'm a big fan of
fan made trailers and uh, you know trailers that were
made by by people who, um, we're doing it a
(22:49):
sort of a film project that where there's no real movie,
the trailer is the film. And there are a couple
of really good ones out there. For example, Grayson is
probably one of my favorites, which of course is about
the the man who once was Robin of Batman and
Robin fame and he has to solve a murder mystery
and m and it includes pretty much every d C
(23:12):
character you can think of. In a little flash at
some point in that preview and not the flash, but
the but the preview is the previous, very very impressive,
and at the end of it you're like, oh, when
is that coming out? And then you realize, oh wait,
that was the movie. Um, and then of course you
really did see it all then. I also like gob Stopper,
which was a funny or die video clip is just
(23:33):
a joke, but it was a horror movie version of
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring Christopher Lloyd as
the demented Willy Wonka. Uh. It is awesome. UM, So
if you haven't seen it, check it out. Don't check
it out at work. Um. That's all I have to
say about that, all right, So thanks very much for
that listener mail. If any of you want to write in,
(23:56):
you can write us tech stuff at how stuff works
dot com. We have blogs up. You can find that
at how stuff works dot com. Look over in the
right hand side you'll see the blogs listed. And keep
your eyes peeled because on Fridays I'm going to start
wrapping up our podcast discussions in a blog post, so
that if you have anything you want to contribute to
the discussion, you can write into the comments there and
(24:17):
I'll be responding as well. Who knows, we might even
get Pullette to respond once in a while, um, if
he feels up to it, because you know, Fridays are
tough days for editors here. Yes, that's no joke. They've
got a lot of work to do on Fridays. But
we will talk to you again really soon. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
(24:39):
works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two
thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.