Q: Hello, Lynette! I was just reading about RSS feeds in an article that you wrote for Carrie Lauth’s NMBG package. Am I understanding correctly what it is? If I have a website that contains various types of articles, a person can go right to the types of articles that she is interested in through an RSS feed on the Internet? Or are RSS feeds used for other people’s websites to click on the type of articles people want to my website? I must admit I am still confused about how they are used! Thanks- Michelle Robertson.

A: Hi Michelle, the answer to your first question is yes. Very much like a news reader. People who subscribe to your feed will be notified the moment you publish an article and they can click through directly to the article they want to read.

The second part of your question is not exactly clear to me. I am assuming you’re asking if it can be used to publish snippets of your articles on other people’s website which links back to your site. In that case the answer is also yes. If the other site owner agrees to publish your feed, they would need either a plugin or a small software to convert the feeds into HTML to display on their site. Every time you publish a new article, a snippet it will also appear on their site.

A good example is my home page – even though it is not someone else’s site but I’m using the blog’s RSS feed. There. Go to this page. Scroll to the bottom. You should see 5 links and a small description in the “Latest from the blog” area. I’m really using RSS feeds to ‘pull’ snippets of the posts there.

Subscription and displaying the snippets on other sites are not mutually exclusive. An RSS feed is just data. People subscribing to the feed directly or publishing on their website is simply a method of consuming that data.