What is RSS?

RSS is used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.


RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Many news-related sites, weblogs and other online publishers syndicate their content as an RSS Feed to whoever wants it.

Why RSS? Benefits and Reasons for using RSS

RSS solves a problem for people who regularly use the web. It allows you to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from the sites you are interested in. You save time by not needing to visit each site individually. You ensure your privacy, by not needing to join each site's email newsletter. The number of sites offering RSS feeds is growing rapidly and includes big names like Yahoo News.

What do I need to do to read an RSS Feed? RSS Feed Readers and News Aggregators

Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

A variety of RSS Readers are available for different platforms. Some popular feed readers include Amphetadesk (Windows, Linux, Mac), FeedReader (Windows), and NewsGator (Windows - integrates with Outlook). There are also a number of web-based feed readers available. My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Reader are popular web-based feed readers.

Once you have your Feed Reader, it is a matter of finding sites that syndicate content and adding their RSS feed to the list of feeds your Feed Reader checks. Many sites display a small icon with the acronyms RSS, XML, or RDF to let you know a feed is available.

History

RSS was first invented by Netscape. They wanted to use an XML format to distribute news, stories and information. Netscape refined the version of rss and then dropped it. Userland Software took control of the specficiation and continued to develop it releasing a newer version. A non-commercial group picked up RSS at the same time and based on their interpretation of the Netscape's original concept of RSS they too released a new version. UserLand was not happy with the non-commercial version and continued development of their own version of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), eventually UserLand released RSS v2.

RSS Links: More information on RSS

RSS Info Comprehensive Overview and Links
Syndic8 - Directory of RSS Feeds
What is RSS, and Why Should You Care?
XML.com: What is RSS?
Introduction to RSS - WebReference.com

Most Important Wordpress Plugins

For SEO purpose All in One SEO Pack does the job smoothly and for Google/Yahoo! Spider related crawling, XML sitemap generator is simply irreplaceable. Spam can be anticipated pretty well with Akismet alone, but if U like another method U can use MyCaptcha. Below is the other most Important plugins for Wordpress (gathered from many sources).

1. Wp-Security-scan With almost one new thread popping up every hour in every forum saying that the blog was hacked, this plugin is a must have for any blogger. What it does is that it does a simple security scan regarding permissions and mysql queries, and in easy English tells you what you need to do to be safe

2. Hyper Cache, which is really an awesome plugin for high traffic blogs. Like Wp Cache and Super Cache it does the same, but it reduces the queries much more efficiently! Setting it up is super easy compared to wp cache or super cache! So all high traffic blogs who are complaining that wordpress is a resource hog, check this out immediately

3. If you embed videos in blogs directly then you should check out Smart YouTube, embedding you tube videos in wordpress just is as easy as a pie with this one. It is small, fast and does not depend on any external scripts. For other plugin check WP YouTube

4. Popularity Contest It simply shows the most popular posts according to some predetermined algorithms. Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. There are numerical values assigned to each type of view and feedback; these are used to create a ‘popularity score’ for each post.

5. For banner management in your blog, you can check out the plugin called Adserve for Wordpress. AdServe is the advertising server for WordPress. You could setup your banner campaigns using different sized banners, set available impressions and count resulting clicks! Optionally AdServe links ads to blog users so that one could check the campaign results within the Dashboard!

6. For adsense, there are quite a few plugins like All in One Adsense and YPN, Adsense Manager, Adsense Deluxe2 etc. However, I personally like to edit the “single post” directly when it comes to adsense.

7. Page Link Manager which shows the pages you want to display on the main navigation. As for example, you might not want to display the disclaimer or privacy policy on the main page navigation, but only want to display them in the footer. This plugin can do the trick for you.

8. If you want to increase the number of comments at your blog then you should use Wordpress Thread Comment which really is one amazing plugin! It turns your comments template “Forum like”, so one can reply to someone’s comment directly by pressing Reply Here and the reply will nicely nest below the original comment. For another plugin check AJAXed Wordpress

9. Simple tags It can show a tag cloud in your sidebar, link pre-specified tags automatically, generate related tags, etc. It is a great plugin for internal link building of your blog.

10. For social bookmarking you can either use ShareThis (uses javascript) or Sociable Automatically add links on your posts to popular Social bookmarking sites.

11. For database backups, you can use Wp Database Backup as it serves the purpose very well. It can generate, repair and email you the wordpress database every night from wordpress admin dashboard! Easy to operate!

12. If you ever suspect that you want to ban someone from visiting your site or blog then you can use Wp-Ban. It can ban specific email addresses or ip addresses from entering your blog. Very useful sometimes to be safe from hackers and fierce competitors.

13. OneClick Installer It reduces the effort needed to install a plugin or a theme for wordpress to just one simple click. It?s excellent for admins, non-techies, people with restrictive firewalls, and just about anyone who uses wordpress and installs plugins and themes.

14. Similar Posts This plugin displays a list of posts which are related or similar to the current post which add many features.

15. WassUp is a new Wordpress plugin to track your visitors in real time. It has a very readable and fancy admin console to keep tracks of your blog’s users visits. It has a “current visitors online” view and a more detailed “visitors details” view where you can know almost everything your users are doing on your blog, it’s very useful for SEO or statistics maniacs. Now it comes with a new “Spy” view in Ajax like the Digg Spy.

16. Admin Drop Down Menus. One of the biggest gripes I have about the WordPress Admin interface is the menu. Most items are always two mouse clicks and two page loads away which takes time and uses up unnecessary bandwidth. This plugin creates proper drop down menus for the WordPress admin pages. It uses a Javascript created menu which has faster rendering with very little overhead once loaded. One click and you are there!

WordPress.com - Step-by-Step Tutorial on How to Blog

Wordpress.com is the site that allows you to get free blogs managed by the developers of the WordPress software. This is a great place to start a blog for those that are just beginning.

This video walks you through how to join the fastest-growing and most elegant free blogging services, WordPress.com. Go from the simple acts of joining all the way through set up and administration. Become a blogger in few than 45-minutes. Most folks only need the first 15 minutes to get you started.

Did this video help you? What did you not understand? or Have anouther question?
Just leave a comment!

What is a Blog

What is a "blog"?

"Blog" is an abbreviated version of "weblog," which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles on other Web sites. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.

Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as home staging, political opinions, web design, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all types of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author's daily life and thoughts.

Generally speaking (although there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:

• A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
• An archive of older articles.
• A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
• A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a "blogroll".
• One or more "feeds" like RSS, Atom or RDF files.

Some blogs may have additional features beyond these.

Original Post found here