Help Topic: What is an RSS Feed, anyway?
What is RSS?
RSS feeds are a means for letting people know when a new entry in a blog or site has gone live, just like email notifications. An RSS file is a list of new items, each of which has a "title" and a "description." You can put many different types of items into a feed: Recent blog entries, recent recaps, recent news articles, upcoming calendar events, etc. If you subscribe to a TWoP RSS feed for a particular show, when the story goes live on the site you'll see a new item that looks something like this:
America's Got Talent - Twenty is the Loneliest Number
Season 3 Episode 14: We've had four hours of Top 20 week here in AGT land and it's not over yet! The audience is losing it, the sound guy fell asleep, The Hoff can't stay awake, Jerry can't stay on cue, and Piers is getting tarred and feather. It's attrition, but fun attrition.
The title would be a link to the full recap, and the text is our usual blurb summarizing the story.
Now, why is this helpful to you?
You're probably familiar with classic three-pane view from most email programs: On the left is a list or tree structure of your email folders. On the upper right is a list of messages in the current folder, usually listing author, subject and date for each mail, and on the bottom right you get to see the content of any message you select from that list.
RSS Feeds allow you to access other kinds of content in this same display format. Basically, every feed will become a folder on the left; you'll get a list of items on the upper right listing their author, title and publishing date; on the bottom right you'll see the description of the currently selected item. The feed reader will regularly check for new items. It's possible with every good feed reader to organize the feeds into categories (sub-folders) in the tree, e.g. you could have a folder "News" for all generic news feeds and a folder "TWoP" for all TWoP-related feeds.
What was wrong with email subscriptions?
The shortest answer is that we kept having problems with the software required, and as the number of subscribers increased, and the number of shows increased, those problems became more and more pervasive. RSS features are built into the software we use, so it's much easier to set them up and modify them.
There are also advantages to you. Really, we swear! Email notifications get caught in spam filters. If you change your email address for some reason, you have to remember to change your subscription as well. And if your email inbox is frequently overflowing, notifications can either get lost in the mess, or add to it. If you're following multiple shows (or multiple sites) it's much easier to keep track of what's new (and/or what you haven't had time to read) using RSS folders. Even if you're only following one or two shows, it can be useful to just have your feeds set up as folders right next to your email.
If you don't currently use RSS feeds, a nice rundown of different aggregators can be found here.
This may be nice for some people, but I still prefer email notifications.
Many email programs today can also be used as feed readers. They're not especially good at it, which is why there still are dedicated feed readers, but it's great for light users, since they probably check their email every day anyway, and this way they can check their daily websites at the same time. Check the help files for your email software to see if you can subscribe to a feed using it directly.
There are also many sites that will convert RSS feeds into email notifications for you. Plug "RSS email" into a search engine and you'll turn up tons of them. Most are free, but they probably will include a text-ad of some kind at the bottom to pay for the service. We have tested these two, so if you don't know where to start try:
They both offer a very simple set-up and options for previewing the feed to make sure it's what you want. Be aware that because you are depending on a third party, the notifcation may be delayed a little longer (by a few hours) than it would be if you subscribed directly to the feed directly. We'd recommend trying a couple different services for a week or two, seeing which works the best or is the promptest with your particular email account, and then dropping the ones that don't make the cut.
Major props to SP8472 for writing 80% of this explanation.
RSS feeds are a means for letting people know when a new entry in a blog or site has gone live, just like email notifications. An RSS file is a list of new items, each of which has a "title" and a "description." You can put many different types of items into a feed: Recent blog entries, recent recaps, recent news articles, upcoming calendar events, etc. If you subscribe to a TWoP RSS feed for a particular show, when the story goes live on the site you'll see a new item that looks something like this:
America's Got Talent - Twenty is the Loneliest Number
Season 3 Episode 14: We've had four hours of Top 20 week here in AGT land and it's not over yet! The audience is losing it, the sound guy fell asleep, The Hoff can't stay awake, Jerry can't stay on cue, and Piers is getting tarred and feather. It's attrition, but fun attrition.
The title would be a link to the full recap, and the text is our usual blurb summarizing the story.
Now, why is this helpful to you?
You're probably familiar with classic three-pane view from most email programs: On the left is a list or tree structure of your email folders. On the upper right is a list of messages in the current folder, usually listing author, subject and date for each mail, and on the bottom right you get to see the content of any message you select from that list.
RSS Feeds allow you to access other kinds of content in this same display format. Basically, every feed will become a folder on the left; you'll get a list of items on the upper right listing their author, title and publishing date; on the bottom right you'll see the description of the currently selected item. The feed reader will regularly check for new items. It's possible with every good feed reader to organize the feeds into categories (sub-folders) in the tree, e.g. you could have a folder "News" for all generic news feeds and a folder "TWoP" for all TWoP-related feeds.
What was wrong with email subscriptions?
The shortest answer is that we kept having problems with the software required, and as the number of subscribers increased, and the number of shows increased, those problems became more and more pervasive. RSS features are built into the software we use, so it's much easier to set them up and modify them.
There are also advantages to you. Really, we swear! Email notifications get caught in spam filters. If you change your email address for some reason, you have to remember to change your subscription as well. And if your email inbox is frequently overflowing, notifications can either get lost in the mess, or add to it. If you're following multiple shows (or multiple sites) it's much easier to keep track of what's new (and/or what you haven't had time to read) using RSS folders. Even if you're only following one or two shows, it can be useful to just have your feeds set up as folders right next to your email.
If you don't currently use RSS feeds, a nice rundown of different aggregators can be found here.
This may be nice for some people, but I still prefer email notifications.
Many email programs today can also be used as feed readers. They're not especially good at it, which is why there still are dedicated feed readers, but it's great for light users, since they probably check their email every day anyway, and this way they can check their daily websites at the same time. Check the help files for your email software to see if you can subscribe to a feed using it directly.
There are also many sites that will convert RSS feeds into email notifications for you. Plug "RSS email" into a search engine and you'll turn up tons of them. Most are free, but they probably will include a text-ad of some kind at the bottom to pay for the service. We have tested these two, so if you don't know where to start try:
They both offer a very simple set-up and options for previewing the feed to make sure it's what you want. Be aware that because you are depending on a third party, the notifcation may be delayed a little longer (by a few hours) than it would be if you subscribed directly to the feed directly. We'd recommend trying a couple different services for a week or two, seeing which works the best or is the promptest with your particular email account, and then dropping the ones that don't make the cut.
Major props to SP8472 for writing 80% of this explanation.
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