In the past year we’ve seen the popularity of both blogs and podcasts explode. There are fewer and fewer websites that do not have an RSS feed available for their customers and/or visitors. In fact, if you are a business on the web, an RSS feed is a necessity. RSS started out as being Rich Site Summary, then it migrated to RDF Site Summary, and finally most of us now know it as Really Simple Syndication. RSS allows online users to see the content of your website without the need to actual visit your website in their browser. RSS also allows enclosures which are now used to attach podcasts to a feed. The idea is that a user can take the RSS feed, which is XML code, and place it in a aggregator, or RSS feed reader program and then receive the headlines, or articles or attached audio or video files directly onto their computer through this aggregator. As an example, here are the RSS feeds for my website and podcast. Surf-Bits Switcher Blog, and The Mac ReviewCast Podcast.

Now that we have the background covered, I’ll explain to you why we are discussing RSS. Notepage, Inc. has developed a program for PC and Mac called FeedForAll. FeedForAll is a RSS feed creation tool. Now the first thing that crossed my mind is , “I use Wordpress and another blogging program which automatically creates RSS feeds via PHP when new articles are added. Why do I need a third party program?” I found out that many of these auto-generated RSS feeds are missing tags or in the case of podcasts, are not iTunes compatible. Let’s look at FeedForAll’s features and I think you’ll see why everyone can use this program.

Read the entire article at Surf-Bits.com