June 14, 2004

What Is RSS?

About MSDN: RSS Feeds

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) provides a convienent way to syndicate information from a variety of sources, including news stories, updates to a web site or even source code check-ins for a development project. Regardless of the purpose for which the RSS file is being used, by watching this XML file, you can quickly and easily see whenever an update has occurred. Of course, viewing the RSS feed in Internet Explorer and hitting F5 every few minutes is not the most efficient use of your time, so most people take advantage of some form of client software to read and monitor RSS feeds.

There are many different RSS clients available, but here are a selected few that we tested our feeds with and that you may find useful:

SharpReader,
FeedReader
AmphetaDesk,
NewsGator, and
RSS Bandit, which you can build yourself based on this article in the MSDN Library.

If you're using Microsoft SharePoint, you can get the MSDN Headlines feed delivered to your SharePoint site using Tim Heuer's RSS Reader Web Part.

Whenever you see this rss_button.gif
(or most often xml.gif
) it should link to an RSS feed that you can subscribe to via your RSS client.

June 14, 2004 at 12:29 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home