Channel: Often used interchangeably with "feed". Each RSS channel can contain up to 15 items. These items can be articles, blog entries or virtually any kind of document found on the World Wide Web. An RSS channel is the Internet equivalent of a radio station or TV channel, broadcasting news and information to anyone who wants to receive it.
Feed: A special Internet document that describes an RSS feed. Feeds are written in a variation of the XML computer language. That’s why you often see an orange "XML" button right next to the orange "RSS" button that helps you to find an RSS feed on a web site.
Hosting: The process of a company providing a place on their servers for your functions. An ISP or Web ‘Hosting’ company has a computer that will serve or ‘host’ your web site. Hosting can apply to many functions on the Internet such as Web Sites, Email Accounts, Domain Name Servers and yes, even RSS Feeds! We host RSS feeds, Podcast files and posts for our members.
Item Post: A single item, blog entry or web page that you share with everyone who is interested in your topic. Each item/post is described in your RSS feed file. The actual content of the post could be anywhere on the Internet.
Pinging: Testing whether a particular web site is online, by sending a message and waiting for a response. We make it easy for you to ‘ping’ services such as Yahoo!? to let them know that your feed has been updated.
Publish: Get your RSS feed file hosted and make it available to everyone on the Internet.
Publisher: The person responsible for the content of an RSS feed or channel. This person usually writes or locates relevant news items and updates his or her RSS channel.
RSS: Really Simple Syndication. Basically it is a format to publish information. RSS is a new standard for how people receive news, information, and communicate. Just so you’ll know, RSS once called Rich Site Summary. If you see this term somewhere, remember it’s the same RSS you know and love.
RSS Directory: A web site with a categorized list of RSS feeds. There may be any number of categories and any number of feeds in any category. It’s similar to other web directories such the directory on Yahoo!?
RSS Formats: There are several formats. The latest and fastest growing is 2.0 It has the most functionality. All Feeds created with our service meet RSS 2.0 standards. They are also fully compatible with RSS 0.91 and 0.92 – which makes them work in all known feed readers.
RSS Feed Aggregator: Used interchangeably with feed reader
RSS Feed Reader: Typically a desktop software application that understands XML & RSS and turns it into visual content that looks very much like a web page.
Search Engine: A program that searches documents for given keywords and returns a list of the documents or Web pages where the keywords were found. Also applies to Web sites that catalogue other Web sites by topic. By entering your subject or title, you access their database, which hopefully provides you with a list of Web sites containing pertinent information.
Syndication: The process by which a site is able to share information with other sites. For example, you provide RSS content such as news items, a blog, etc., on your web site and allow people using feed readers to show your news on their web sites.